Big Woods: The Hunting Stories

  “They was fixing to kill me!” he says. “They was going to burn me to death! They had done tried me and tied me onto the pile of wood, and one of them was coming with the fahr when I managed to bust loose and run!”

  “Who was?” Major says. “What in the tarnation hell are you talking about?”

  “Them Indians!” Luke says. “They was fixing to—”

  “What?” Major hollers. “Damn to blue blazes, what?”

  And that was where I had to put my foot in hit. He hadn’t never seen me until then. “At least they cured your hiccups,” I says.

  Hit was then that he stopped right still. He hadn’t never even seen me, but he seen me now. He stopped right still and looked at me with that ere wild face that looked like hit had just escaped from Jackson and had ought to be took back there quick.

  “What?” he says.

  “Anyway, you done run out from under them hiccups,” I says.

  Well, sir, he stood there for a full minute. His eyes had done gone blank, and he stood there with his head cocked a little, listening to his own insides. I reckon hit was the first time he had took time to find out that they was gone. He stood there right still for a full minute while that ere kind of shocked astonishment come onto his face. Then he jumped on me. I was still setting in my chair, and I be dog if for a minute I didn’t think the roof had done fell in.

  Well, they got him offen me at last and got him quieted down, and then they washed me off and give me a drink, and I felt better. But even with that drink I never felt so good but what I felt hit was my duty to my honor to call him outen the back yard, as the fellow says. No, sir. I know when I done made a mistake and guessed wrong; Major de Spain wasn’t the only man that caught a bear on that hunt; no, sir. I be dog, if it had been daylight, I’d a hitched up my Ford and taken out of there. But hit was midnight, and besides, that nigger, Ash, was on my mind then. I had just begun to suspect that hit was more to this business than met the nekkid eye. And hit wasn’t no good time then to go back to the kitchen then and ask him about hit, because Luke was using the kitchen. Major had give him a drink, too, and he was back there, making up for them two days he hadn’t et, talking a right smart about what he aimed to do to such and such a sonabitch that would try to play his durn jokes on him, not mentioning no names; but mostly laying himself in a new set of hiccups, though I ain’t going back to see.

  So I waited until daylight, until I hyeard the niggers stirring around in the kitchen; then I went back there. And there was old Ash, looking like he always did, oiling Major’s boots and setting them behind the stove and then taking up Major’s rifle and beginning to load the magazine. He just looked once at my face when I come in, and went on shoving ca’tridges into the gun.

  “So you went up to the mound last night,” I says. He looked up at me again, quick, and then down again. But he never said nothing, looking like a durned old frizzle-headed ape. “You must know some of them folks up there,” I says.

  “I knows some of um,” he says, shoving ca’tridges into the gun.

  “You know old John Basket?” I says.

  “I knows some of um,” he says, not looking at me.

  “Did you see him last night?” I says. He never said nothing at all. So then I changed my tone, like a fellow has to do to get anything outen a nigger. “Look here,” I says. “Look at me.” He looked at me. “Just what did you do up there last night?”

  “Who, me?” he says.

  “Come on,” I says. “Hit’s all over now. Mr. Hogganbeck has done got over his hiccups and we done both forgot about anything that might have happened when he got back last night. You never went up there just for fun last night. Or maybe hit was something you told them up there, told old man Basket. Was that hit?” He had done quit looking at me, but he never stopped shoving ca’tridges into that gun. He looked quick to both sides. “Come on,” I says. “Do you want to tell me what happened up there, or do you want me to mention to Mr. Hogganbeck that you was mixed up in hit some way?” He never stopped loading the rifle and he never looked at me, but I be dog if I couldn’t almost see his mind working. “Come on,” I says. “Just what was you doing up there last night?”

  Then he told me. I reckon he knowed hit wasn’t no use to try to hide hit then; that if I never told Luke, I could still tell Major. “I jest dodged him and got dar first en told um he was a new revenue agent coming up dar tonight, but dat he warn’t much en dat all dey had to do was to give um a good skeer en likely he would go away. En dey did en he did.”

  “Well!” I says. “Well! I always thought I was pretty good at joking folks,” I says, “but I take a back seat for you. What happened?” I says. “Did you see hit?”

  “Never much happened,” he says. “Dey jest went down de road a piece en atter a while hyer he come a-hicken’ en a-blumpin’ up de road wid de lant’un en de gun. They took de lant’un en de gun away frum him en took him up pon topper de mound en talked de Injun language at him fer a while. Den dey piled up some wood en fixed him on hit so he could git loose in a minute, en den one of dem come up de hill wid de fire, en he done de rest.”

  “Well!” I says. “Well, I’ll be eternally durned!” And then all on a sudden hit struck me. I had done turned and was going out when hit struck me, and I stopped and I says, “There’s one more thing I want to know. Why did you do hit?”

  Now he set there on the wood box, rubbing the gun with his hand, not looking at me again. “I wuz jest helping you kyo him of dem hiccups.”

  “Come on,” I says. “That wasn’t your reason. What was hit? Remember, I got a right smart I can tell Mr. Hogganbeck and Major both now. I don’t know what Major will do, but I know what Mr. Hogganbeck will do if I was to tell him.”

  And he set there, rubbing that ere rifle with his hand. He was kind of looking down, like he was thinking. Not like he was trying to decide whether to tell me or not, but like he was remembering something from a long time back. And that’s exactly what he was doing, because he says:

  “I ain’t skeered for him to know. One time dey was a picnic. Hit was a long time back, nigh twenty years ago. He was a young man den, en in de middle of de picnic, him en two udder white men—I fergit dey name—rid up wid dey pistols out en cotch us niggers one at a time en burned our collars off. Hit was him dat burnt mine.”

  “And you waited all this time and went to all this trouble, just to get even with him?” I says.

  “Hit warn’t dat,” he says, rubbing the rifle with his hand. “Hit wuz de collar. Back in dem days a top nigger hand made two dollars a week. I paid half of it fer dat collar. Hit wuz blue, wid a red picture of de race betwixt de Natchez en de Robert E. Lee running around hit. He burnt hit up. I makes ten dollars a week now. En I jest wish I knowed where I could buy another collar like dat un fer half of hit. I wish I did.”

  There were railroads in the wilderness

  now; people who used to go overland by carriage or horseback to the River landings for the Memphis and New Orleans steamboats could take the train from almost anywhere now. And presently Pullmans too, all the way from Chicago and the Northern cities and the Northern money, the Yankee dollars arriving between sheets and even in drawing rooms to open the wilderness, nudge it further and further toward obsolescence with the whine of saws; what had been one vast unbroken virgin span was now booming with cotton and timber both. Or rather, booming with simple money: increment’s troglodyte which had fathered twin ones: solvency and bankruptcy, the three of them booming money into the land so fast now that the problem was to get rid of it before it whelmed you into strangulation.

  And now paved roads too as the cotton seed and the lumber mills pushed what remained of the big woods further and further southward into the V of the River and the hills; when old Isaac McCaslin was a boy he shot bear and deer and wild turkey after less than a day in a mule-drawn wagon; even when he had got old enough for young men to begin to call him Uncle Ike and the distance was fifty miles instead of twenty, it still took only a
part of a day in the automobile, even though the roads were dirt ones. Now they had concrete: a hundred miles instead of fifty, then two hundred instead of one as the wilderness dwindled southward into the notch of the hills and the Old Man.

  Sometimes it would seem to him that the three of them—himself, the old hunter, and the hills and the vast River—had presided over a cycle; or rather, not a cycle but a mad and pointless merry-go-round, with two of them anyway—the inviolable hills and the great invincible almost inattentive River—impervious to it: the timber which had to be logged and sold in order to deforest the land in order to convert the soil to raising cotton in order to sell the cotton in order to make the land valuable enough to be worth spending money raising dykes to keep the River off of it. Or try to, since the Old Man didn’t care about cotton, didn’t give a damn about cotton in fact; the Old Man and all his little contributing streams levee’d too, himself paying none of the dykes any heed whatever when it suited his mood and fancy, gathering water all the way from Montana to Pennsylvania every generation or so and rolling it down the artificial gut of his victims’ puny and baseless hoping, piling the water up, not fast, just inexorably, giving plenty of time to measure his crest and telegraph ahead, even warning of the exact day almost when he would enter the house and float the piano out of it and the pictures off the walls, and even remove the house itself if it were not securely fastened down.

  Inexorable and unhurried, overpassing one by one his little confluent feeders and shoving the water into them until for days their current would flow backward, upstream: as far upstream as Wylie’s Crossing where the original, the authentic Major de Spain had established the camp where he, the old hunter, had fifty years ago made his esquire’s vigil to the Big Woods and been accepted, accoladed. The little rivers were dyked too, but back here was the land of individualists: remnants and descendants of the tall men now taken to farming, and of Snopeses who were more than individualists: they were Snopeses, so that where the owners of the thousand-acre plantations along the Big River confederated as one man with sandbags and machines and their Negro tenants and wage-hands to hold the sandboils and the cracks, back here the owner of the hundred- or two-hundred-acre farm patrolled his section of levee with a sandbag in one hand and his shotgun in the other, lest his upstream neighbor dynamite it to save his (the upstream neighbor’s) own.

  Piling up the water while white man and Negro worked side by side in shifts in the mud and the rain, with automobile headlights and gasoline flares and kegs of whisky and coffee boiling in fifty-gallon batches in scoured and scalded oil drums; lapping, tentative, almost innocently, merely inexorable (no hurry, his) among and beneath and between and finally over the frantic sandbags, as if his whole purpose had been merely to give man another chance to prove, not to him but to man, just how much the human body could bear, stand, endure; then, having let man prove it, doing what he could have done at any time these past weeks if so minded: removing with no haste, nor any particular malice or fury either, a mile or two miles of levee and coffee drums and whisky kegs and gas flares in one sloughing collapse, gleaming dully for a little while yet among the parallel cotton middles until the fields vanished along with the roads and lanes and at last the towns themselves.

  Vanished, gone beneath one vast yellow motionless expanse, out of which projected only the tops of trees and telephone poles and the decapitations of human dwelling-places like enigmatic objects placed by inscrutable and impenetrable design on a dirty mirror; and the mounds of the predecessors on which, among a tangle of moccasins, bear and horses and deer and mules and wild turkeys and cows and domestic chickens waited patient in mutual armistice; and the levees themselves, where among a jumble of uxorious flotsam the young continued to be born and the old to die, not from exposure but from simple and normal time and decay, as if man and his destiny were in the end stronger even than the river which had dispossessed him, inviolable by and invincible to alteration.

  Then, having proved that too, he—the Old Man—would withdraw, not retreat: subside, back from the land slowly and inexorably too, emptying the confluent rivers and bayous back into the old vain hopeful gut, but so slowly and gradually that not the waters seemed to fall but the flat earth itself to rise, creep in one plane back into light and air again: one constant stain of yellow-brown at one constant altitude on telephone poles and the walls of gins and houses and stores as though the line had been laid off with a transit and painted in one gigantic unbroken brush stroke, the earth itself one alluvial inch higher, the rich dirt one inch deeper, drying into long cracks beneath the hot fierce glare of May: but not for long, because almost at once came the plow, the plowing and planting already two months late but that did not matter: the cotton man-tall once more by August and whiter and denser still by picking time, as if the Old Man said, “I do what I want to, when I want to. But I pay my way.”

  It was his native land; he had been born of it and his bones would sleep in it—the cradling hills and the river valley which they cradled—the hills along whose edge the plantation lay where he had been born and where old Sam Fathers, son of a Negro slave and a Chickasaw king, had trained and taught him how to use a gun with care and respect, in order to be worthy to enter the Big Woods when his time came. The Big Woods, the Big Bottom, the wilderness, vanished now from where he had first known it; the very spot where he and Sam were standing when he heard his first running hounds and cocked the gun and saw the first buck, was now thirty feet below the surface of a government-built flood-control reservoir whose bottom was rising gradually and inexorably each year on another layer of beer cans and bottle tops and lost bass plugs; the wilderness itself, where he had served his humble apprenticeship to the rough food and the rough sleeping, the life of hungers: men and horses and hounds, not to slay the game but to pursue it, touch and let go, never satiety;—the wilderness, the Big Woods themselves being shoved, pushed just as inexorably further and further on until now the mile-long freight trains were visible for miles across the cotton fields, seeming to pass two or even three of the little Indian-named hamlets at one time over the ground where every November they would run the ritual of the old warp-footed bear;—the Big Woods, shoved, pushed further and further down into the notch where the hills and the Big River met, where they would make their last stand. It would be a good one too, impregnable; by that time, they would be too dense, too strong with life and memory, of all which had ever run in them, ever to die—the strong irritable loud-reeking bear, the gallant high-headed stags looking longer than comets and pale as smoke, the music-ed and untiring dogs and the splattered horses and the men who rode them; himself too. Oh yes, he would think; me too. I’ve been too busy all my life trying not to waste any living, to have time left to die.

  4

  RACE

  AT MORNING

  I WAS in the boat when I seen him. It was jest dust-dark; I had jest fed the horses and clumb back down the bank to the boat and shoved off to cross back to camp when I seen him, about half a quarter up the river, swimming; jest his head above the water, and it no more than a dot in that light. But I could see that rocking chair he toted on it and I knowed it was him, going right back to that canebrake in the fork of the bayou where he lived all year until the day before the season opened, like the game wardens had give him a calendar, when he would clear out and disappear, nobody knowed where, until the day after the season closed. But here he was, coming back a day ahead of time, like maybe he had got mixed up and was using last year’s calendar by mistake. Which was jest too bad for him, because me and Mister Ernest would be setting on the horse right over him when the sun rose tomorrow morning.

  So I told Mister Ernest and we et supper and fed the dogs, and then I holp Mister Ernest in the poker game, standing behind his chair until about ten o’clock, when Roth Edmonds said, “Why don’t you go to bed, boy?”

  “Or if you’re going to set up,” Willy Legate said, “why don’t you take a spelling book to set up over? He knows every cuss word in the
dictionary, every poker hand in the deck and every whisky label in the distillery, but he can’t even write his name. Can you?” he says to me.

  “I don’t need to write my name down,” I said. “I can remember in my mind who I am.”

  “You’re twelve years old,” Walter Ewell said. “Man to man now, how many days in your life did you ever spend in school?”

  “He ain’t got time to go to school,” Willy Legate said. “What’s the use in going to school from September to middle of November, when he’ll have to quit then to come in here and do Ernest’s hearing for him? And what’s the use in going back to school in January, when in jest eleven months it will be November fifteenth again and he’ll have to start all over telling Ernest which way the dogs went?”

  “Well, stop looking into my hand, anyway,” Roth Edmonds said.

  “What’s that? What’s that?” Mister Ernest said. He wore his listening button in his ear all the time, but he never brought the battery to camp with him because the cord would bound to get snagged ever time we run through a thicket.

  “Willy says for me to go to bed!” I hollered.

  “Don’t you never call nobody ‘mister’?” Willy said.

  “I call Mister Ernest ‘mister,’ ” I said.

  “All right,” Mister Ernest said. “Go to bed then. I don’t need you.”

  “That ain’t no lie,” Willy said. “Deaf or no deaf, he can hear a fifty-dollar raise if you don’t even move your lips.”

  So I went to bed, and after a while Mister Ernest come in and I wanted to tell him again how big them horns looked even half a quarter away in the river. Only I would ’a’ had to holler, and the only time Mister Ernest agreed he couldn’t hear was when we would be setting on Dan, waiting for me to point which way the dogs was going. So we jest laid down, and it wasn’t no time Simon was beating the bottom of the dishpan with the spoon, hollering, “Raise up and get your four-o’clock coffee!” and I crossed the river in the dark this time, with the lantern, and fed Dan and Roth Edmondziz horse. It was going to be a fine day, cold and bright; even in the dark I could see the white frost on the leaves and bushes—jest exactly the kind of day that big old son of a gun laying up there in that brake would like to run.