Two weeks later they would return, with no trophy, no skin. He had not expected it. He had not even feared that it might be in the wagon this time with the other skins and heads. He did not even tell himself that in three years or two years or one year more he would be present and that it might even be his gun.
He believed that only after he had served his apprenticeship in the woods which would prove him worthy to be a hunter, would he even be permitted to distinguish the crooked print, and that even then for two November weeks he would merely make another minor one, along with his cousin and Major de Spain and General Compson and Walter Ewell and Boon and the dogs which feared to bay it and the shotguns and rifles which failed even to bleed it, in the yearly pageant-rite of the old bear’s furious immortality.
His day came at last. In the surrey with his cousin and Major de Spain and General Compson he saw the wilderness through a slow drizzle of November rain just above the ice point as it seemed to him later he always saw it or at least always remembered it — the tall and endless wall of dense November woods under the dissolving afternoon and the year’s death, sombre, impenetrable (he could not even discern yet how, at what point they could possibly hope to enter it even though he knew that Sam Fathers was waiting there with the wagon), the surrey moving through the skeleton stalks of cotton and corn in the last of open country, the last trace of man’s puny gnawing at the immemorial flank, until, dwarfed by that perspective into an almost ridiculous diminishment, the surrey itself seemed to have ceased to move (this too to be completed later, years later, after he had grown to a man and had seen the sea) as a solitary small boat hangs in lonely immobility, merely tossing up and down, in the infinite waste of the ocean while the water and then the apparently impenetrable land which it nears without appreciable progress, swings slowly and opens the widening inlet which is the anchorage.
He entered it. Sam was waiting, wrapped in a quilt on the wagon seat behind the patient and steaming mules.
He entered his novitiate to the true wilderness with Sam beside him as he had begun his apprenticeship in miniature to manhood after the rabbits and such with Sam beside him, the two of them wrapped in the damp, warm, negro-rank quilt while the wilderness closed behind his entrance as it had opened momentarily to accept him, opening before his advancement as it closed behind his progress; no fixed path the wagon followed but a channel nonexistent ten yards ahead of it and ceasing to exist ten yards after it had passed, the wagon progressing not by its own volition but by attrition of their intact yet fluid circumambience, drowsing, earless, almost lightless.
It seemed to him that at the age of ten he was witnessing his own birth. It was not even strange to him. He had experienced it all before, and not merely in dreams. He saw the camp — a paintless six-room bungalow set on piles above the spring high-water — and he knew already how it was going to look. He helped in the rapid orderly disorder of their establishment in it and even his motions were familiar to him, foreknown.
Then for two weeks he ate the coarse, rapid food — the shapeless sour bread, the wild strange meat, venison and bear and turkey and coon which he had never tasted before — which men ate, cooked by men who were hunters first and cooks afterward; he slept in harsh sheetless blankets as hunters slept. Each morning the grey of dawn found him and Sam Fathers on the stand, the crossing, which had been allotted him.
It was the poorest one, the most barren. He had expected that; he had not dared yet to hope even to himself that he would even hear the running dogs this first time. But he did hear them. It was on the third morning — a murmur, sourceless, almost indistinguishable, yet he knew what it was although he had never before heard that many dogs running at once, the murmur swelling into separate and distinct voices until he could call the five dogs which his cousin owned from among the others. “Now,” Sam said, “slant your gun up a little and draw back the hammers and then stand still.”
But it was not for him, not yet. The humility was there; he had learned that. And he could learn the patience. He was only ten, only one week. The instant had passed. It seemed to him that he could actually see the deer, the buck, smoke-coloured, elongated with speed, vanished, the woods, the grey solitude still ringing even when the voices of the dogs had died away; from far away across the sombre woods and the grey half-liquid morning there came two shots. “Now let your hammers down,” Sam said.
He did so. “You knew it too,” he said.
“Yes,” Sam said. “I want you to learn how to do when you didn’t shoot. It’s after the chance for the bear or the deer has done already come and gone that men and dogs get killed.”
“Anyway, it wasn’t him,” the boy said. “It wasn’t even a bear. It was just a deer.”
“Yes,” Sam said, “it was just a deer.”
Then one morning, it was in the second week, he heard the dogs again. This time before Sam even spoke he readied the too-long, too-heavy, man-size gun as Sam had taught him, even though this time he knew the dogs and the deer were coming less close than ever, hardly within hearing even. They didn’t sound like any running dogs he had ever heard before even.
Then he found that Sam, who had taught him first of all to cock the gun and take position where he could see best in all directions and then never to move again, had himself moved up beside him.
“There,” he said. “Listen.” The boy listened, to no ringing chorus strong and fast on a free scent but a moiling yapping an octave too high and with something more than indecision and even abjectness in it which he could not yet recognise, reluctant, not even moving very fast, taking a long time to pass out of hearing, leaving even then in the air that echo of thin and almost human hysteria, abject, almost humanly grieving, with this time nothing ahead of it, no sense of a fleeing unseen smoke-coloured shape. He could hear Sam breathing at his shoulder.
He saw the arched curve of the old man’s inhaling nostrils.
“It’s Old Ben!” he cried, whispering.
Sam didn’t move save for the slow gradual turning of his head as the voices faded on and the faint steady rapid arch and collapse of his nostrils. “Hah,” he said. “Not even running. Walking.”
“But up here!” the boy cried. “Way up here!”
“He do it every year,” Sam said. “Once. Ash and Boon say he comes up here to run the other little bears away. Tell them to get to hell out of here and stay out until the hunters are gone. Maybe.” The boy no longer heard anything at all, yet still Sam’s head continued to turn gradually and steadily until the back of it was toward him.
Then it turned back and looked down at him — the same face, grave, familiar, expressionless until it smiled, the same old man’s eyes from which as he watched there faded slowly a quality darkly and fiercely lambent, passionate and proud. “He dont care no more for bears than he does for gods or men neither. He come to see who’s here, who’s new in camp this year, whether he can shoot or not, can stay or not.
Whether we got the dog yet that can bay and hold him until a man gets there with a gun. Because he’s the head bear. He’s the man.” It faded, was gone; again they were the eyes as he had known them all his life. “He’ll let them follow him to the river. Then he’ll send them home. We might as well go too; see how they look when they get back to camp.”
The dogs were there first, ten of them huddled back under the kitchen, himself and Sam squatting to peer back into the obscurity where they crouched, quiet, the eyes rolling and luminous, vanishing, and no sound, only that effluvium which the boy could not quite place yet, of something more than dog, stronger than dog and not just animal, just beast even.
Because there had been nothing in front of the abject and painful yapping except the solitude, the wilderness, so that when the eleventh hound got back about mid-afternoon and he and Tennie’s Jim held the passive and still trembling bitch while Sam daubed her tattered ear and raked shoulder with turpentine and axle-grease, it was still no living creature but only the wilderness which, leaning for a moment, had patted lightly once her temerity.
“Just like a man,” Sam said. “Just like folks. Put off as long as she could having to be brave, knowing all the time that sooner or later she would
