Big Woods: The Hunting Stories

  At noon that day someone came whooping through the woods from the direction of the camp. It was Boon. He came and looked for a while between the logs, at the tremendous dog lying again on its belly, its head up, the yellow eyes blinking sleepily at nothing: the indomitable and unbroken spirit. “What we beter do,” Boon said, “is to let that son of a bitch go and catch Old Ben and run him on the dog.” He turned to the boy his weather-reddened and beetling face. “Get your traps together. Cass says for you to come on home. You been in here fooling with that horse-eating varmint long enough.”

  Boon had a borrowed mule at the camp; the buggy was waiting at the edge of the bottom. He was at home that night. He told McCaslin about it. “Sam’s going to starve him again until he can go in and touch him. Then he will feed him again. Then he will starve him again, if he has to.”

  “But why?” McCaslin said. “What for? Even Sam will never tame that brute.”

  “We don’t want him tame. We want him like he is. We just want him to find out at last that the only way he can get out of that crib and stay out of it is to do what Sam or somebody tells him to do. He’s the dog that’s going to stop Old Ben and hold him. We’ve already named him. His name is Lion.”

  Then November came at last. They returned to the camp. With General Compson and Major de Spain and his cousin and Walter and Boon he stood in the yard among the guns and bedding and boxes of food and watched Sam Fathers and Lion come up the lane from the lot—the Indian, the old man in battered overalls and rubber boots and a worn sheepskin coat and a hat which had belonged to the boy’s father; the tremendous dog pacing gravely beside him. The hounds rushed out to meet them and stopped, except the young one which still had but little of judgment. It ran up to Lion, fawning. Lion didn’t snap at it. He didn’t even pause. He struck it rolling and yelping for five or six feet with a blow of one paw as a bear would have done and came on into the yard and stood, blinking sleepily at nothing, looking at no one, while Boon said, “Jesus. Jesus.—Will he let me touch him?”

  “You can touch him,” Sam said. “He don’t care. He don’t care about nothing or nobody.”

  The boy watched that too. He watched it for the next two years from that moment when Boon touched Lion’s head and then knelt beside him, feeling the bones and muscles, the power. It was as if Lion were a woman—or perhaps Boon was the woman. That was more like it—the big, grave, sleepy-seeming dog which, as Sam Fathers said, cared about no man and no thing; and the violent, insensitive, hard-faced man with his touch of remote Indian blood and the mind almost of a child. He watched Boon take over Lion’s feeding from Sam and Uncle Ash both. He would see Boon squatting in the cold rain beside the kitchen while Lion ate. Because Lion neither slept nor ate with the other dogs though none of them knew where he did sleep until in the second November, thinking until then that Lion slept in his kennel beside Sam Fathers’ hut, when the boy’s cousin McCaslin said something about it to Sam by sheer chance and Sam told him. And that night the boy and Major de Spain and McCaslin with a lamp entered the back room where Boon slept—the little, tight, airless room rank with the smell of Boon’s unwashed body and his wet hunting-clothes—where Boon, snoring on his back, choked and waked and Lion raised his head beside him and looked back from his cold, slumbrous yellow eyes.

  “Damn it, Boon,” McCaslin said. “Get that dog out of here. He’s got to run Old Ben tomorrow morning. How in hell do you expect him to smell anything fainter than a skunk after breathing you all night?”

  “The way I smell ain’t hurt my nose none that I ever noticed,” Boon said.

  “It wouldn’t matter if it had,” Major de Spain said. “We’re not depending on you to trail a bear. Put him outside. Put him under the house with the other dogs.”

  Boon began to get up. “He’ll kill the first one that happens to yawn or sneeze in his face or touches him.”

  “I reckon not,” Major de Spain said. “None of them are going to risk yawning in his face or touching him either, even asleep. Put him outside. I want his nose right tomorrow. Old Ben fooled him last year. I don’t think he will do it again.”

  Boon put on his shoes without lacing them; in his long soiled underwear, his hair still tousled from sleep, he and Lion went out. The others returned to the front room and the poker game where McCaslin’s and Major de Spain’s hands waited for them on the table. After a while McCaslin said, “Do you want me to go back and look again?”

  “No,” Major de Spain said. “I call,” he said to Walter Ewell. He spoke to McCaslin again. “If you do, don’t tell me. I am beginning to see the first sign of my increasing age: I don’t like to know that my orders have been disobeyed, even when I knew when I gave them that they would be.—A small pair,” he said to Walter Ewell.

  “How small?” Walter said.

  “Very small,” Major de Spain said.

  And the boy, lying beneath his piled quilts and blankets waiting for sleep, knew likewise that Lion was already back in Boon’s bed, for the rest of that night and the next one and during all the nights of the next November and the next one. He thought then: I wonder what Sam thinks. He could have Lion with him, even if Boon is a white man. He could ask Major or McCaslin either. And more than that. It was Sam’s hand that touched Lion first and Lion knows it. Then he became a man and he knew that too. It had been all right. That was the way it should have been. Sam was the chief, the prince; Boon, the plebeian, was his huntsman. Boon should have nursed the dogs.

  On the first morning that Lion led the pack after Old Ben, seven strangers appeared in the camp. They were swampers: gaunt, malaria-ridden men appearing from nowhere, who ran trap-lines for coons or perhaps farmed little patches of cotton and corn along the edge of the bottom, in clothes but little better than Sam Fathers’ and nowhere near as good as Tennie’s Jim’s, with worn shotguns and rifles, already squatting patiently in the cold drizzle in the side yard when day broke. They had a spokesman; afterward Sam Fathers told Major de Spain how all during the past summer and fall they had drifted into the camp singly or in pairs and threes, to look quietly at Lion for a while and then go away: “Mawnin, Major. We heerd you was aimin to put that ere blue dawg on that old two-toed bear this mawnin. We figgered we’d come up and watch, if you don’t mind. We won’t do no shooting, lessen he runs over us.”

  “You are welcome,” Major de Spain said. “You are welcome to shoot. He’s more your bear than ours.”

  “I reckon that ain’t no lie. I done fed him enough cawn to have a sheer in him. Not to mention a shoat three years ago.”

  “I reckon I got a sheer too,” another said. “Only it ain’t in the bear.” Major de Spain looked at him. He was chewing tobacco. He spat. “Hit was a heifer calf. Nice un too. Last year. When I finally found her, I reckon she looked about like that colt of yourn looked last June.”

  “Oh,” Major de Spain said. “Be welcome. If you see game in front of my dogs, shoot it.”

  Nobody shot Old Ben that day. No man saw him. The dogs jumped him within a hundred yards of the glade where the boy had seen him that day in the summer of his eleventh year. The boy was less than a quarter-mile away. He heard the jump but he could distinguish no voice among the dogs that he did not know and therefore would be Lion’s, and he thought, believed, that Lion was not among them. Even the fact that they were going much faster than he had ever heard them run behind Old Ben before and that the high thin note of hysteria was missing now from their voices was not enough to disabuse him. He didn’t comprehend until that night, when Sam told him that Lion would never cry on a trail. “He gonter growl when he catches Old Ben’s throat,” Sam said. “But he ain’t gonter never holler, no more than he ever done when he was jumping at that two-inch door. It’s that blue dog in him. What you call it?”

  “Airedale,” the boy said.

  Lion was there; the jump was just too close to the river. When Boon returned with Lion about eleven that night, he swore that Lion had stopped Old Ben once but that the hounds would not go in
and Old Ben broke away and took to the river and swam for miles down it and he and Lion went down one bank for about ten miles and crossed and came up the other but it had begun to get dark before they struck any trail where Old Ben had come up out of the water, unless he was still in the water when he passed the ford where they crossed. Then he fell to cursing the hounds and ate the supper Uncle Ash had saved for him and went off to bed and after a while the boy opened the door of the little stale room thunderous with snoring and the great grave dog raised its head from Boon’s pillow and blinked at him for a moment and lowered its head again.

  When the next November came and the last day, the day on which it was now becoming traditional to save for Old Ben, there were more than a dozen strangers waiting. They were not all swampers this time. Some of them were townsmen, from other county seats like Jefferson, who had heard about Lion and Old Ben and had come to watch the great blue dog keep his yearly rendezvous with the old two-toed bear. Some of them didn’t even have guns and the hunting-clothes and boots they wore had been on a store shelf yesterday.

  This time Lion jumped Old Ben more than five miles from the river and bayed and held him and this time the hounds went in, in a sort of desperate emulation. The boy heard them; he was that near. He heard Boon whooping; he heard the two shots when General Compson delivered both barrels, one containing five buckshot, the other a single ball, into the bear from as close as he could force his almost unmanageable horse. He heard the dogs when the bear broke free again. He was running now; panting, stumbling, his lungs bursting, he reached the place where General Compson had fired and where Old Ben had killed two of the hounds. He saw the blood from General Compson’s shots, but he could go no further. He stopped, leaning against a tree for his breathing to ease and his heart to slow, hearing the sound of the dogs as it faded on and died away.

  In camp that night—they had as guests five of the still terrified strangers in new hunting coats and boots who had been lost all day until Sam Fathers went out and got them—he heard the rest of it: how Lion had stopped and held the bear again but only the one-eyed mule which did not mind the smell of wild blood would approach and Boon was riding the mule and Boon had never been known to hit anything. He shot at the bear five times with his pump gun, touching nothing, and Old Ben killed another hound and broke free once more and reached the river and was gone. Again Boon and Lion hunted as far down one bank as they dared. Too far; they crossed in the first of dusk and dark overtook them within a mile. And this time Lion found the broken trail, the blood perhaps, in the darkness where Old Ben had come up out of the water, but Boon had him on a rope, luckily, and he got down from the mule and fought Lion hand-to-hand until he got him back to camp. This time Boon didn’t even curse. He stood in the door, muddy, spent, his huge gargoyle’s face tragic and still amazed. “I missed him,” he said. “I was in twenty-five feet of him and I missed him five times.”

  “But we have drawn blood,” Major de Spain said. “General Compson drew blood. We have never done that before.”

  “But I missed him,” Boon said. “I missed him five times. With Lion looking right at me.”

  “Never mind,” Major de Spain said. “It was a damned fine race. And we drew blood. Next year we’ll let General Compson or Walter ride Katie, and we’ll get him.”

  Then McCaslin said, “Where is Lion, Boon?”

  “I left him at Sam’s,” Boon said. He was already turning away. “I ain’t fit to sleep with him.”

  So he should have hated and feared Lion. Yet he did not. It seemed to him that there was a fatality in it. It seemed to him that something, he didn’t know what, was beginning; had already begun. It was like the last act on a set stage. It was the beginning of the end of something, he didn’t know what except that he would not grieve. He would be humble and proud that he had been found worthy to be a part of it too or even just to see it too.

  3. It was December. It was the coldest December he had ever remembered. They had been in camp four days over two weeks, waiting for the weather to soften so that Lion and Old Ben could run their yearly race. Then they would break camp and go home. Because of these unforeseen additional days which they had had to pass waiting on the weather, with nothing to do but play poker, the whisky had given out and he and Boon were being sent to Memphis with a suitcase and a note from Major de Spain to Mr. Semmes, the distiller, to get more. That is, Major de Spain and McCaslin were sending Boon to get the whisky and sending him to see that Boon got back with it or most of it or at least some of it.

  Tennie’s Jim waked him at three. He dressed rapidly, shivering, not so much from the cold because a fresh fire already boomed and roared on the hearth, but in that dead winter hour when the blood and the heart are slow and sleep is incomplete. He crossed the gap between house and kitchen, the gap of iron earth beneath the brilliant and rigid night where dawn would not begin for three hours yet, tasting, tongue palate and to the very bottom of his lungs the searing dark, and entered the kitchen, the lamp-lit warmth where the stove glowed, fogging the windows, and where Boon already sat at the table at breakfast, hunched over his plate, almost in his plate, his working jaws blue with stubble and his face innocent of water and his coarse, horse-mane hair innocent of comb—the quarter Indian, grandson of a Chickasaw squaw, who on occasion resented with his hard and furious fists the intimation of one single drop of alien blood and on others, usually after whisky, affirmed with the same fists and the same fury that his father had been the full-blood Chickasaw and even a chief and that even his mother had been only half white. He was four inches over six feet; he had the mind of a child, the heart of a horse, and little hard shoe-button eyes without depth or meanness or generosity or viciousness or gentleness or anything else, in the ugliest face the boy had ever seen. It looked like somebody had found a walnut a little larger than a football and with a machinist’s hammer had shaped features into it and then painted it, mostly red; not Indian red but a fine bright ruddy color which whisky might have had something to do with but which was mostly just happy and violent out-of-doors, the wrinkles in it not the residue of the forty years it had survived but from squinting into the sun or into the gloom of cane-brakes where game had run, baked into it by the camp fires before which he had lain trying to sleep on the cold November or December ground while waiting for daylight so he could rise and hunt again, as though time were merely something he walked through as he did through air, aging him no more than air did. He was brave, faithful, improvident and unreliable; he had neither profession, job nor trade and owned one vice and one virtue: whisky, and that absolute and unquestioning fidelity to Major de Spain and the boy’s cousin McCaslin. “Sometimes I’d call them both virtues,” Major de Spain said once. “Or both vices,” McCaslin said.

  He ate his breakfast, hearing the dogs under the kitchen, wakened by the smell of frying meat or perhaps by the feet overhead. He heard Lion once, short and peremptory, as the best hunter in any camp has only to speak once to all save the fools, and none other of Major de Spain’s and McCaslin’s dogs were Lion’s equal in size and strength and perhaps even in courage, but they were not fools; Old Ben had killed the last fool among them last year.

  Tennie’s Jim came in as they finished. The wagon was outside. Ash decided he would drive them over to the logline where they would flag the outbound log-train and let Tennie’s Jim wash the dishes. The boy knew why. It would not be the first time he had listened to old Ash badgering Boon.

  It was cold. The wagon wheels banged and clattered on the frozen ground; the sky was fixed and brilliant. He was not shivering, he was shaking, slow and steady and hard, the food he had just eaten still warm and solid inside him while his outside shook slow and steady around it as though his stomach floated loose. “They won’t run this morning,” he said. “No dog will have any nose today.”

  “Cep Lion,” Ash said. “Lion don’t need no nose. All he need is a bear.” He had wrapped his feet in towsacks and he had a quilt from his pallet bed on the kitchen floor dra
wn over his head and wrapped around him until in the thin brilliant starlight he looked like nothing at all that the boy had ever seen before. “He run a bear through a thousand-acre ice-house. Catch him too. Them other dogs don’t matter, because they ain’t going to keep up with Lion nohow, long as he got a bear in front of him.”

  “What’s wrong with the other dogs?” Boon said. “What the hell do you know about it anyway? This is the first time you’ve had your tail out of that kitchen since we got here except to chop a little wood.”

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with them,” Ash said. “And long as it’s left up to them, ain’t nothing going to be. I just wish I had knowed all my life how to take care of my health good as them hounds knows.”

  “Well, they ain’t going to run this morning,” Boon said. His voice was harsh and positive. “Major promised they wouldn’t until me and Ike get back.”

  “Weather gonter break today. Gonter soft up. Rain by night.” Then Ash laughed, chuckled, somewhere inside the quilt which concealed even his face. “Hum up here, mules!” he said, jerking the reins so that the mules leaped forward and snatched the lurching and banging wagon for several feet before they slowed again into their quick, short-paced, rapid plodding. “Sides, I like to know why Major need to wait on you. It’s Lion he aiming to use. I ain’t never heard tell of you bringing no bear nor no other kind of meat into this camp.”

  Now Boon’s going to curse Ash or maybe even hit him, the boy thought. But Boon never did, never had; the boy knew he never would even though four years ago Boon had shot five times with a borrowed pistol at a Negro on the street in Jefferson, with the same result as when he had shot five times at Old Ben last fall. “By God,” Boon said, “he ain’t going to put Lion or no other dog on nothing until I get back tonight. Because he promised me. Whip up them mules and keep them whipped up. Do you want me to freeze to death?”