It was December; it was the coldest December I ever saw. We—I was just sixteen that year—had been in camp a week now and the men had run out of whiskey, and so Boon Hogganbeck and I went in to Memphis with a suitcase and a note from Major de Spain to get some more. That is, Major de Spain sent Boon in to get the whiskey, and he sent me along to get Boon back to camp with the whiskey in the suitcase and not in Boon. Boon was part Indian. They said half, but I don’t think so. I think it was his grandmother who was the Chickasaw woman, niece of the chief who once owned the land which Major de Spain now owned and over which we hunted.
Boon was four inches over six feet, and he had the mind of a child and the heart of a horse and the ugliest face I ever saw. It looked as if somebody had found a walnut a little smaller than a basket ball and with a machinist’s hammer had shaped the features of the face and then painted it, mostly red. Not Indian red: a fine bright ruddy color that whiskey might have had something to do with but probably mostly just happy and violent out-of-door life. The wrinkles in it—he must have been forty years old—must have come just from squinting into the sun or into the gloom of cane brakes where game had run, or have been baked into his face by camp fires while he tried to sleep on the cold November or December ground while waiting for daylight so he could get up and hunt again—as though time were just something he walked through as he did in air, to age him no more than air did. The eyes were like shoebuttons, without depth, without meanness or generosity or viciousness or gentleness or anything at all: just something to see with. He didn’t have any profession or trade or even job: he just did whatever Major de Spain told him to do. Later, after Lion died, Major de Spain had him appointed marshal of Hoke’s, the little town on the edge of Major de Spain’s preserve. But that had not happened yet; Lion was not dead yet.
We got up at three o’clock this morning. Ad had breakfast ready and we ate, hearing the dogs under the kitchen, wakened too by the smell of the frying ham or maybe by Ad’s feet on the floor overhead; we could hear Lion then, just once, short and peremptory, as the best hunter in any crowd has only to speak once to all the others except the ones that are fools, and there were no fools among Major de Spain’s dogs. As he said, sometimes he had fools in the house because now and then he could not help himself. But that did not matter so much because he did not intend to hunt with them or depend on them to hunt.
Ad had the mules in the wagon, waiting too, and it was cold, the ground frozen and the stars hard and bright. I was not shivering, I was just shaking slow and steady and hard, the breakfast I had just eaten warm and comfortable inside me and my stomach still warm from it and the outside of me shaking slow and hard as if my stomach were floating loose inside me like the globe of a floating compass.
“They won’t run this morning, anyway,” I said. “No dog will have any nose to-day.”
“Cep’ Lion,” Ad said. “He run a bear thu a thousand-acre ice house. Ketch him too. Other dogs don’t matter because they don’t keep up wid Lion nohow.”
“Well, they ain’t going to run this morning,” Boon said, harsh and positive. “Major promised they wouldn’t run till me and Quentin get back.”
He was sitting on the jolting seat, his feet wrapped in towsacks and a quilt from his pallet in the kitchen wrapped around him and over his head so that he didn’t look like anything at all. Ad laughed. “I like to know why Major need to wait on you. Hit’s Lion he gonter use; I ain’t never heard tell of you bringing no bear nor any yuther kind of meat into this camp.”
“By God, he ain’t going to put Lion or no other dog on nothing until I get back,” Boon said. “Because he promised me. Whup up them mules; you want me to freeze to death?”
He and Ad were funny. It was Lion that made the difference, because Boon had a bad name among negroes. Yet Ad talked to him, when Lion was a factor (even though he was not mentioned), just as if Ad were another white man; and Boon let him do it. They were funny about Lion. Neither one of them owned him or had any hope of ever owning him and I don’t believe it ever occurred to either of them to think, I wish I owned that dog. Because you didn’t think of Lion as belonging to anyone, any more than you thought about a man belonging to anybody, not even to Major de Spain. You thought of the house and the woods as belonging to him and even the deer and the bear in them; even the deer and bear killed by other people were shot by them on Major de Spain’s courtesy, given to them through his kindness and will. But not Lion. Lion was like the chiefs of Aztec and Polynesian tribes who were looked upon as being not men but both more and less than men. Because we were not men either while we were in camp: we were hunters, and Lion the best hunter of us all, and Major de Spain and Uncle Ike McCaslin next; and Lion did not talk as we talked, not because he could not but because he was the chief, the Sunbegotten, who knew the language which we spoke but was superior to using it himself; just as he lived under the house, under the kitchen, not because he was a dog, an animal, but for the same reason as the Aztec or the Polynesian whose godhead required that he live apart. Lion did not belong to Major de Spain at all but just happened to like him better than he did any of the rest of us, as a man might have.
Ad and Boon were funny about him. You would have almost thought that Lion was a woman, a beautiful woman. I used to listen to them; they would wait until Major de Spain had settled down to the poker game or maybe was in bed, if we were going out early, and then Boon and Ad would each try to get Lion in to sleep on his pallet with him, Ad in the kitchen and Boon in the shed room. It would be funny. They would be so deadly serious about it, not arguing with each other but each one trying to work on Lion, persuade or tempt him; and he not caring which one he slept with, and not staying long with either one even when they persuaded him, because always Major de Spain would carry the lamp into Boon’s shed or into the kitchen, as the case might be, and make them put Lion outdoors. “Damn it,” he would say, “if he slept with either one of you for half the night he wouldn’t even be able to trace a polecat to-morrow.”
So we went on, under the iron stars, the wagon jolting in the iron ruts, the woods impenetrable and black on either hand. Once we heard two wildcats squalling and fighting off to the right and not far away. We came to the dummy line and Boon flagged the early log train and we rode into Hoke’s in the warm caboose, while I slept behind the red stove and Boon and the conductor and brakeman talked about Lion and Old Ben as people talked about Sullivan and Kilrain or Dempsey and Tunney. Old Ben was a bear and we were going to run him to-morrow as we did once every year, every time in camp. He was known through the country as well as Lion was. I don’t know why they called him Old Ben nor who named him except that it was a long time ago. He was known well for the shoats he had stolen and the corn cribs he had broken into and the dogs he had killed and the number of times he had been bayed and the lead which he carried (it was said that he had been shot at least two dozen times, with buckshot and even with rifles). Old Ben had lost three toes from his nigh hind foot in a steel trap, and every man in the country knew his track, even discounting the size, and so he should have been called Two-Toe. That is, that’s what they had been calling two-toed bears in this country for a hundred years. Maybe it was because Old Ben was an extra bear—the head bear, Uncle Ike McCaslin called him—and everyone knew that he deserved a better name.
We were in Hoke’s by sun-up, Boon and me, getting out of the warm caboose in our hunting clothes, our muddy boots, and stained khaki. Boon hadn’t shaved since we came into camp, but that was all right because Hoke’s was just a sawmill and a few stores, and most of the men in it wore muddy boots and khaki too. Then the accommodation came; Boon bought three packages of molasses-covered popcorn and a bottle of soda pop from the news butch and I went to sleep to the sound of his chewing. But in Memphis we did not look all right. The tall buildings and the hard pavements and the street cars made our boots and khaki look a little rougher and muddier and made Boon’s whiskers look worse and his face more and more as if he should never have brough
t it out of the woods at all or at least out of reach of Major de Spain or somebody who knew it and could say, “Don’t be afraid. He’s all right; he won’t hurt you”—Boon walking through the station, on the tile floor, his face moving where he was still working the popcorn out of his teeth with his tongue, his legs spraddled a little and a little stiff in the hips as if he were walking on buttered glass, and that blue stubble on his face and chin like used steel wool or like ravelings from screen wire.
We went straight and had the suitcase filled and Boon bought a bottle for himself, to take home after we broke camp, he said. But by the time we reached Hoke’s again at sundown, it was all gone. He drank the first time in the washroom at the station. A man in uniform came in to tell Boon he couldn’t drink there and took one look at Boon’s face and didn’t say anything. The next time he drank from his water glass, filling it under the edge of the counter where we were eating dinner and the waitress did tell him he could not. In the meantime he had been telling the waitress and all the other customers about Lion and Old Ben. Then he got on to the subject of the zoo some way, and his plan was to hurry back to camp, get Lion and return to the zoo where, he said, the bears were fed lady fingers and ice cream and where we would match Lion against them all, tigers and elephants included. But I got him and the suitcase aboard the train, so we were all right then, with Boon drinking right in the aisle and telling the other passengers about Lion and Old Ben; the men he buttonholed no more dared to act as if they did not want to listen than the man in the washroom had dared to tell Boon he couldn’t drink there. We were back in Hoke’s at sundown and I waked him and got him and the suitcase off and persuaded him to eat supper.
When we got on the caboose of the evening log train which went back into the woods, the sun was going down red and it already seemed warmer. I was the one who went to sleep again now, sitting behind the stove again while Boon and the brakeman and the conductor talked about Lion and Old Ben and the drive to-morrow; they knew what Boon was talking about. Once I waked; it was dark now and the brakeman was leaning out the window. “It’s overcast,” he said. “It will thaw to-night and to-morrow scent will lie to a dog’s nose. Maybe Lion will get him to-morrow.”
It would have to be Lion or somebody. It would not be Boon. He never could shoot. He never had killed anything bigger than a squirrel that anybody knew of, except that nigger that time. That was several years ago. They said he was a bad nigger, but I don’t know. All I know is, there was some trouble and the nigger told Boon he’d better have a pistol next time he came to town and Boon borrowed a pistol from Major de Spain and sure enough that afternoon he met the nigger and the nigger outs with a dollar-and-a-half mail order pistol and he would have burned Boon up with it only it never went off. It just snapped five times and the nigger kept coming, and Boon shot four times and broke a plate-glass window and shot in the leg a nigger woman who happened to be passing before he managed to hit the nigger in the face at six feet with the last shot. He never could shoot. The first day in camp, the first drive we made, the buck ran right over him; we measured later and the buck’s tracks and the five exploded shells were not fifty feet apart. We heard Boon’s old pump gun go whow whow whow whow whow and then we heard him; they could have heard him clean up to Hoke’s: “God damn, here he comes! Head him! Head him!”
The next morning we had company, people from Hoke’s and from Jefferson too, who came every year for the day when Major de Spain drove Old Ben. It was gray and warmer; we ate breakfast by lamplight, with Boon frying the eggs and still talking, looking wilder and more unpredictable and more uncurried in the face than ever, and Ad sitting on his box beside the stove, pushing the heavy solid greasy cartridges into Major de Spain’s carbine. And we could hear the dogs too now, in the yard where Ad had already coupled them in pairs and tied them to the fence—the snarling bursts of almost hysterical uproar; we could hear them all except Lion.
There was no sound from him, there never was; I remember how after breakfast we went out and into the damp, gray, faint light and there he stood, apart from the other dogs and not tied, just standing there and looking huge as a calf looks, or an elephant or buffalo calf, huge despite its actual size. He was part Walker, but most of him was mastiff; he was the color of a blue sorrel horse, though perhaps it was his topaz-colored eyes that made him look so dark. I remember how he stood there—big-footed, with his strong grave head and a chest almost as big as mine. Beneath the skin you could feel the long, easy, quiet, strong muscles that did not flinch with either pleasure or distaste from any touch, Major de Spain’s or Boon’s or Ad’s or any stranger’s. He stood like a horse, only different from a horse because a horse promises only speed while Lion promised—with that serene and comforting quality of a promise from a man whom you trust absolutely—an immeasurable capacity not only for courage and skill and will to pursue and kill, but for endurance, the will to endure beyond any imaginable limit to which his flesh and heart might be called. I remember him in the summer when we would go in for squirrels, how when the other dogs would be all over the bottom, chasing coon and wildcat and anything that ran and left scent, Lion would not go. He would stay in camp with us, not especially following Major de Spain or Boon or Ad in particular; just lying nearby somewhere in the attitude in which they carve lions in stone, with his big head raised and his big feet quiet before him; you would go to him and speak to him or pat him and he would turn his head slowly and look at you with those topaz eyes that were as impenetrable as Boon’s, as free of meanness or generosity or gentleness or viciousness but a good deal more intelligent. Then he would blink and then you would realize that he was not looking at you at all, not seeing you at all. You didn’t know what he was seeing, what he was thinking. It was like when you are sitting with your feet propped against a column on the gallery and after a while you are not even aware that you are not seeing the very column your feet are propped against.
The two mules were ready too, one for Major de Spain, who was going with Boon and Ad and the dogs; and the other for Uncle Ike McCaslin, who was going to put us on the stands. Because he and Major de Spain knew Old Ben as well as they knew each other. They knew where he denned and where he used and which direction he took when dogs jumped him. That was why we had been in camp a week and hadn’t run him yet; that was the way Major de Spain did. Each year he ran Old Ben just one time, unless Old Ben happened to let himself be caught out of bounds on a visit or something and the dogs started him by accident, which did happen the second day in camp. We heard them strike something and carry it down toward the river; Lion was not with them. They went out of hearing and after a while Boon came up, cussing. But hunting was over for that day and so we went back to camp. We had not heard them again, but when we reached camp the dogs were already there, crouched back under the kitchen, huddled together as far back as they could go and Boon squatting down and peering under the kitchen at them and cussing, and Uncle Ike said it was Old Ben they had struck. Because they knew Old Ben too and the ones that didn’t know him probably found out pretty quick. They were not cowards. It was just that Lion hadn’t been with them to lead them in on him and bay him and hold him. Lion was with Major de Spain; they came in about an hour later with Lion on the leash and Major de Spain said it was Old Ben, that he had seen the track, still having to hold Lion on the leash because he was saving Old Ben for to-day. I remember him sitting on the mule in the gray light with his rifle across the saddle, and Boon with his old gun slung over his shoulder by a piece of cotton rope and still cussing while he and Ad struggled to hold the dogs while they untied them, and only Lion and Major de Spain calm and Major de Spain looking around at us and saying, “No deer this morning, boys. This is Old Ben’s race.”
He meant there must be no shooting, no noise that might turn Old Ben because he wanted everybody to have a fair chance. Uncle Ike explained that to me when he put me on my stand, after we watched Major de Spain ride away, with Lion heeled and pacing along beside the mule and Ad and Boon in fron
t, stooped over and half running in a surging uproar of dogs as if they were running in surf.
“Stay here until you kill a bear or hear a horn, or until you haven’t heard a dog in an hour,” Uncle Ike said. “If Lion bays him, me or Major or Boon will blow everybody in. If you don’t hear anything after a while, go back to camp. If you get lost, stand right still and holler and listen. Some of the boys will hear you.”
“I’ve got my compass,” I said.
“All right. Stay right still now. He may cross the bayou right here; I have known him to do it. Don’t move around. If he comes over you, give him time to get close. Then hold right on his neck.” Then he rode away, into the gray gloom.
It was full daylight now; that is, it was full daylight up above the trees, because it would never be very light down here that day. I had never been in this part of the bottom before, because Major de Spain had not let us hunt here lest we disturb Old Ben before the right day. I stood there under a gum tree beside the bayou, where the black, still water ran out of the cane and across a little clearing and into the cane again. I had been on stand before where you might see a bear and I had seen bear signs. But this was different; I was just sixteen then; I kept on thinking about those dogs huddled back there under the kitchen that day and I could smell the solitude, the loneliness, something breathing out of this place which human beings had merely passed through without altering it, where no axe or plow had left a scar, which looked exactly as it had when the first Indian crept into it and looked around, arrow poised and ready. I thought about how just twenty miles away was Jefferson, the houses where people were getting ready to wake up in comfort and security, the stores and offices where during the day they would meet to buy and sell and talk, and I could hardly believe it; I thought It’s just twenty miles away. What’s the matter with you? but then the other side of me, the other thing in me would say, Yes, and you are just a puny assortment of bones and meat that cannot get one mile from where you stand without that compass to help you and could not spend one night where you are and live without fire to keep you warm and perhaps that gun to protect yourself.