Most Decembers, reliving my squirrel and rabbit holiday hunting days, I re-read Faulkner’s hunting stories, following Isaac (Ike) McCaslin from age 10 to 70 through “The Old People,” “The Bear,” and Delta Autumn” in “Go Down Moses.”
Ike himself learned mostly from old Sam Fathers, in whose veins ran Native American, African and white blood. “And as he talked about those old times and those dead and vanished men of another race from either that the boy knew, gradually to the boy those old times would cease to be old times and would become a part of the boy’s present, not only as if they had happened yesterday but as if they were still happening…. And more: as if some of them had not happened yet but would occur tomorrow….”
“His cousin McCaslin brought him to the camp, the big woods, to earn for himself from the wilderness the name and state of hunter provided he in turn were humble and enduring enough.” Sam tells Ike he has taught him all he knows and sends him into the woods. “The wilderness closed behind his entrance as it had opened momentarily to accept him….”
“If Sam Fathers had been his mentor and the backyard rabbits and squirrels his kindergarten, then the wilderness the old bear ran was his college and the old male bear itself, so long unwifed and childless as to have become its own progenitor, was his alma mater.” (Melville had written something similar in “Moby Dick”: that a whaling ship had been his Harvard College and his Yale.)
Two years later, Ike kills his first deer: “[The wilderness] seemed to lean inward above them…in their separate lurking places, tremendous, attentive, impartial and omniscient, the buck moving in it somewhere…perhaps conscious also of the eye of the ancient immortal Umpire.”
“He stood trying not to tremble, humbly and with pride too…’I slew you; my bearing must not shame your quitting life. My conduct forever onward must become your death,’ marking him for that and for more than that: …juxtaposed not against the wilderness but against the tamed land, the old wrong and shame itself, in repudiation and denial at least of the land and the wrong and the shame even if he couldn’t cure the wrong and eradicate the shame.”
Faulkner summarizes what Ike has learned: “[God] created man to be his overseer on the earth and to hold suzerainty over the earth and the animals on it in His name.” “Apparently there is a wisdom beyond even that learned through suffering necessary for a man to distinguish between liberty and license.” Faulkner is writing, theologically, about natural law, about the still, small voice of conscience and moral principle, the Universal Truth implanted in creation by the Creator, invisible to many, viewable by the few “who knew things that had been tamed out of our blood so long ago that we have not only forgotten them, we have to live together in herds to protect ourselves from our own sources.”
Sam Fathers never lived outside the wilderness, but Ike lives in town, except for occasional forays to the dwindling wilderness. God’s natural laws from “out there” are transferable to man’s settlements, Faulkner thinks (or hopes). Inside city limits, Ike is a Christ-figure, a childless carpenter, a messenger.
Faulkner wrote the hunting stories late in life, at a point when he had become aware that he had a moral obligation to educate, not just to entertain. The civil rights movement was looming, and he wanted the South to atone for its shortcomings — especially in black-white relations and man-nature relations. Ike articulates what was on God’s mind: “I will give him his chance. I will give him warning and foreknowledge too, along with the desire to follow and the power to slay. The woods and fields he ravages and the game he devastates will be the consequence and signature of his crime and guilt, and his punishment.”
Faulkner’s hunting stories end on a hopeful note. A pregnant black girl shows up in the hunting camp seeking the white father of her unborn child. Ike hands her his ancient hunting horn and, pointing to the unborn child, says simply, “It’s his. Take it.” The “it” legacy is what the wilderness taught and still teaches: if we “endure” with high principles sustaining us, we may yet “prevail.”
How, after the wilderness and its interpreters vanish, do its lessons get passed along? That question Faulkner left unanswered. Who are today’s decipherers of moral meaning for the modern city that Sam and Ike and a buck and a bear were for the forested and agrarian wilderness?
Larry McGehee, professor-emeritus at Wofford College, may be reached by e-mail at mcgeheelt@wofford.edu.
