I had forgotten that I had a gun. I had completely forgotten it. I was telling myself that black bears are not dangerous, they won’t hurt a man unless they are cornered, when all of a sudden I thought, with a kind of amazed surprise, Besides, I have a gun. Why, I have a gun! I had clean forgotten it. I hadn’t even loaded it; I broke it quickly, fumbling in my coat for shells. I was not scared any more now; I was just suffering one of those mindless and superstitious illusions which people get—I do anyway. I believed that by getting scared and failing to load my gun, I was going to fail the others and let Old Ben through. I had conferred supernatural powers on him now. I had a picture of him lurking back in the cane, watching his chance and waiting for one of us who barred his way to make a mistake, and I had made it; I believed, knew, that he would charge out of the cane and pass me before I could get loaded. I thought I should never pick up the two shells, and then I had a terrible impulse to read the size of the shot printed on the wadding to be sure, even though I knew I had only buckshot. But I didn’t; I got the gun loaded and snapped it shut, already swinging toward the spot of cane where I had hypnotized myself to believe he would emerge. I think that if a bird had moved in it I should have fired.
But I never saw him. I just heard the dogs. Suddenly I knew that I had been hearing them for a second or two before I realized what it was. That must have been when they jumped him because I heard Lion, just once. His voice was not deep especially, it was just strong and full; he bayed just once somewhere in the gray light maybe a mile away, and that was all, as if he had said, “All right, Old Man. Let’s go.” It was the other dogs making the racket. But I never saw any of them. At the closest time they were a half mile away and they didn’t pass near any stand because I heard no shots. I just stood there, crouched, holding my breath, with the safety off even though father had taught me never to take it off until I saw what I was going to shoot at; and I heard the dogs pass me and go on. Then the sound died away. I didn’t move; I waited. I was thinking, maybe he will turn and come back. But I knew that he would not. He must have known where all of us were standing; he probably picked the one gap where he could have got through unseen. Because he had lived too long now, been run too many times. I stood there, still holding my gun forward, though I did slip the safety back on. I don’t know how long it was; then I whirled. But it was only father. “You didn’t see him?” father said.
“No, sir. But it was Old Ben, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. So Uncle Ike says. He’s gone across the river. He won’t come back to-day. So we might as well go back to camp.”
We went back to camp. Major de Spain was already there, sitting on the mule with Boon’s gun in the rope sling over his shoulder now (he told how Boon had stopped just long enough to throw the gun at him and say, “Here, take the damn thing. I can’t hit him with it nohow”). They had the other team in the wagon, and some of them were just loading the boat into the wagon when we came up, and Major de Spain told us how Old Ben and the dogs had crossed the river, and that Ad and Boon had swum it too, and that Uncle Ike was waiting at the river while he came back for the boat.
“He killed Kate this side of the river without even stopping,” Major de Spain said. “Come on, boys. Lion wasn’t five hundred yards behind him. He will bay him soon and then we will get him.”
So we all went back to the river. But the boat was just a duck boat, so it wouldn’t hold any more than Major de Spain and Uncle Ike. Theophilus McCaslin, Uncle Ike’s grandson, said he knew about a log drift across the river about three miles down, so he and some of the others went to look for it. I wanted to go too, but father said I’d better come on back to camp so the rest of us came back to camp, with the mules and the wagon and the dead dog.
It began to rain before we got back; it rained slowly and steadily all afternoon, and we ate dinner and then Theophilus and the others came in and said they had got across the river but they couldn’t hear anything and so they came back. The men played cards some but not much because every now and then somebody would go to the window and look out across the field to where the woods began, the black trees standing in the rain like a picture in ink beginning to dissolve. “He must have carried them clean out of the country,” somebody said.
It was still raining at dark. But we didn’t eat supper yet; we waited, and now there was somebody watching the woods all the time, and just before dark Theophilus McCaslin began to blow a horn every five minutes to guide them in. Yet when they did come, nobody saw them at all; we were all inside at the fire; we just heard the noise at the back door and then in the hall; we were still sitting down when Boon walked into the room. He was carrying something big wrapped in his hunting coat, but we didn’t even look to see what it was because we were looking at Boon. He was wet and muddy and there was blood all over him, streaked by the rain. But that wasn’t it. It was his face, his head. There was a bloody furrow (you could see the five claw-marks) wide as my hand starting up in his hair and running down the side of his head and right on down his arm to the wrist; there was a bloody blob hanging on the side of his head that I didn’t know until the next day was his left ear, and his right breeches’ leg had been ripped off and the leg under it looking like raw beef and the blood from it staining his boot darker than the rain. But that wasn’t it either. Because then we saw that what he was carrying in the coat was Lion. He stood there in the door, looking at us, and he began to cry. I never had seen a man cry before. He stood there in the lamplight, looking big as all outdoors and bloody as a hog, with that tough unshaven face of his crinkled up and more like a dried walnut than ever, and the tears streaming down it fast as rain.
“Good God, Boon!” father said. We got up then; we all kind of surged toward him and somebody tried to touch the coat; I hadn’t even seen Major de Spain standing behind him until then.
“Get to hell away!” Boon hollered to the one who touched the coat. “His guts are all out of him.” Then he hollered, “Saddle me a mule! Hurry!” and turned, with all of us following now, and crossed the hall into the shed where he slept and laid Lion on his pallet. “Damn it to hell, get me a mule!” he hollered.
“A mule?” somebody said.
“Yes!” Boon hollered. “I’m going to Hoke’s and get a doctor!”
“No, you’re not,” Major de Spain said. “You need a doctor yourself. One of the other boys will go.”
“The hell I ain’t!” Boon hollered. He looked wild, bloody and wild as he glared round at us, then he ran out, the torn bloody clothes flapping behind him, still hollering, “Help me catch a mule!”
“Go and help them,” father said, pushing me toward the door. There were three of us. We were almost too late to help any; we had to run to keep up with him. Maybe he was still crying, or maybe he was in too much of a hurry to cry now. We kept on trying to find out what happened but Boon couldn’t even seem to hear the questions; he was talking to himself, saddling the mule fast, cussing and panting.
“I tried to get him back, make him stay out,” he said. “I tried to. And them others wouldn’t help him, wouldn’t go in.” And he did try. Ad said (Ad was there; he saw it all) that when Boon ran in, Lion was already on the ground and that Boon caught him by the hind leg and flung him twenty feet away, but that Lion hit the ground already running and that he beat Boon back to Old Ben.
Then Boon got into the saddle without even touching the stirrups and was gone; we could hear the mule already loping. Then we went back to the house, where Major de Spain was sitting on the pallet with Lion’s head in his lap, soaking a rag in a pan of water and squeezing it into Lion’s mouth. Lion was still wrapped in the coat and under a blanket, to keep the air away from his entrails. But I don’t think he was suffering now. He just lay there with his head on Major de Spain’s knee and his eyes open a little and looking yellower than ever in the lamplight; once I saw his tongue come out and touch Major de Spain’s hand. Then about midnight (Major de Spain had sent the wagon back to the river before he followed Boon into the ho
use) Uncle Ike and Ad came in with Old Ben; and Ad stood in the door too, as Boon had done, with the tears running down his face too, and Uncle Ike told about it, what Ad had told him: about how Lion had bayed Old Ben against a down tree top and the other dogs would not go in, and how Old Ben caught Lion and had him on the ground, and Boon ran in with the hunting knife and jerked Lion back, but he would not stay out; and how this time Boon jumped straddle of Old Ben’s back and got the knife into him, under the shoulder; Ad said that Boon picked Old Ben clean up from behind, his arm round Old Ben’s neck and Old Ben striking backward at Boon’s head and arm while Boon worked the knife blade round until he touched the life.
Boon got back just before daylight with the doctor, and the doctor told about that too: how Boon busted past the doctor’s wife when she opened the door and how the first thing the doctor knew was when Boon waked him up dragging him out of the bed like a sack of meal. He thought Boon was crazy, especially when he saw him, the blood and all. Boon wouldn’t even wait long enough to have himself attended to; he didn’t even want to wait long enough for the doctor to put on his clothes. He wouldn’t let the doctor do anything for him now until he had fixed Lion; he just stood there in his blood and his torn clothes and with his wild face, saying, “Save him, Doc. By God, you had better save him!”
They couldn’t give Lion chloroform; they didn’t dare. They had to put his entrails back and sew him up without it. But I still don’t think he felt it, suffered. He just lay there on Boon’s pallet, with his eyes half open and Major de Spain holding his head, until the doctor was through. And not even Boon said, “Will he live?” We just sat there and talked quietly until the light came and we went out to look at Old Ben with his eyes open too and his lips snarled back and the neat slit just in front of the shoulder where Boon had finally found his life, and the mutilated hind foot and the little hard lumps under his skin which were the old bullets, the old victories. Then Ad said breakfast was ready. We ate, and I remember how that was the first time we could not hear any dogs under the kitchen, though I asked Ad and he said that they were there. It was as though Old Ben, even dead and harmless out there in the yard, was a more potent force than they were alive without Lion to lead them in, and they knew it.
The rain had stopped before midnight and about noon a thin sun came out and we moved Lion out onto the porch, in the sun. It was Boon’s idea. “Damn it,” he said, “he never did like to stay in the house. You know that. At least let’s take him out where he can see the woods.” So Boon loosened the floor boards under the pallet so that we could pick up the pallet without changing Lion’s position, and we carried him out to the porch and we sat there now. The people at Hoke’s had heard that we had got Old Ben and about Lion; there must have been a hundred men came in during the afternoon to look at Old Ben and then come and look at Lion, to sit and talk quietly about Lion, the races he had made and the bears he had brought to bay, and now and then Lion would open his eyes (Boon had laid him so he could look at the woods without moving) not as if he was listening to what they were saying but as if he was looking at the woods for a moment before closing his eyes again, remembering the woods again or seeing that they were still there. Maybe he was, because he waited until dark before he died. We broke camp that night; we went out in the wagon, in the dark. Boon was quite drunk by then. He was singing, loud.
This is how Lion’s death affected the two people who loved him most—if you could have called Boon’s feeling for him, for anything, love. And I suppose you could, since they say you always love that which causes you suffering. Or maybe Boon did not consider being clawed by a bear suffering.
Major de Spain never went back again. But we did; he made us welcome to go; it seemed to please him when we went. Father and the others who had been there that time would talk about it, about how maybe if they could just persuade him to go back once … But he would not; he was almost sharp when he refused. I remember the day in the next summer when I went to his office to ask permission to go in and hunt squirrels. “Help yourself,” he said. “Ad will be glad to have some company. Do you want to take anybody with you?”
“No, sir,” I said. “I thought if maybe Boon …”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll wire him to meet you there.” Boon was the marshal at Hoke’s now; Major de Spain called his secretary and sent Boon the wire right away. We didn’t need to wait for an answer; Boon would be there; he had been doing what Major de Spain told him to for twenty years now at least. So I thanked him and then I stood there and after a minute I got up my nerve and said it:
“Maybe if you would come …”
But he stopped me. I don’t know how he did it because he didn’t say anything at once. He just seemed to turn to his desk and the papers on it without moving; and I stood there looking down at a little plumpish gray-headed man in expensive, unobtrusive clothes and an old-fashioned immaculate boiled shirt, whom I was used to seeing in muddy khaki, unshaven, sitting the mule with the carbine across the saddle, and Lion standing beside him as a thoroughbred horse stands and motionless as a statue, with his strong grave head and his fine chest; the two of them somehow queerly alike, as two people get who have been closely associated for many years in doing something which both of them love and respect. He didn’t look at me again.
“No. I will be too busy. But if you have luck, you might bring me a few squirrels when you come back.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I will.” So I reached Hoke’s early and caught the morning log train into the woods and they put me off at our crossing. It was the same, yet different, because they were summer woods now, in full leaf, not like that iron dawn when Boon and I had flagged the train to go in to Memphis. And it was hot too. Ad was there with the wagon to meet me; we shook hands. “Mr. Boon here yet?” I said.
“Yes, suh. He got in last night. He in de woods fo daylight. Gone up to de Gum Tree.”
I knew where that was. It was a single big gum just outside the woods, in an old clearing. If you crept up to it quietly just after daylight this time of year, sometimes you would catch a dozen squirrels in it, trapped there because they could not jump to another tree and dared not descend. So I told Ad to take my duffel on to the house; I would hunt up through the woods and meet Boon. I didn’t say I was going by the holly knoll, but he must have known that I was, because the point where he put me down was on a direct line with the knoll and the Gum Tree. “Watch out for snakes,” he said. “Dey’s crawling now.”
“I will,” I said. He went on and I entered the woods. They were changed, different. Of course it was just the summer; next fall they would be again as I remembered them. Then I knew that that was wrong; that they would never again be as I remembered them, as any of us remembered them, and I, a boy, who had owned no Lion, knew now why Major de Spain knew that he would never return and was too wise to try to. I went on. Soon the earth began to lift under my feet and then I saw the hollies, the four pale trunks marking the four corners and inside them the wooden cross with Old Ben’s dried mutilated paw nailed to it. There was no trace of grave any more; the spring flood water had seen to that. But that was all right because it was not Lion who was there; not Lion. Maybe it was nice for him now, nice for him and Old Ben both now—the long challenge and the long chase, the one with no heart to be driven and outraged, the other with no flesh to be mauled and bled. It was hot and the mosquitoes were too bad to stand still in, besides it was too late to hunt any more this morning; I would go on and pick up Boon and go back to camp. I knew these woods and presently I knew that I could not be very far from the Gum Tree.
Then I began to hear a curious sound. It sounded like a blacksmith shop—someone hammering fast on metal. It grew louder as I approached. Then I saw the clearing, the sun; the hammering, the furious hammering on metal, was quite loud now, and the trees broke and I saw the Gum Tree and then I saw Boon. It was the same Boon; he had not changed; the same Boon who had almost missed that nigger and had missed that buck; who could not shoot even when hi
s old worn-out gun held together. He was sitting under the tree, hammering at something in his lap, and then I saw that the tree was apparently alive with frightened squirrels. I watched them rush from limb to limb, trying to escape, and rush, dart, down the trunk and then turn and dart back up again. Then I saw what Boon was hammering at. It was a section of his gun; drawing nearer, I saw the rest of it scattered in a dozen pieces about him on the ground where he sat, hunched over, hammering furiously at the part on his lap, his walnut face wild and urgent and streaming with sweat. He was living, as always, in the moment; nothing on earth—not Lion, not anything in the past—mattered to him except his helpless fury with his broken gun. He didn’t stop; he didn’t even look up to see who I was; he just shouted at me in a hoarse desperate voice.
Get out of here!” he said. “Don’t touch them! They’re mine!”
The Old People
At first there was nothing but the faint, cold, steady rain, the gray and constant light of the late November dawn, and the voices of the dogs converging somewhere in it. Then Sam Fathers, standing just behind me, as he had been standing when I shot my first running rabbit four years ago, touched me and I began to shake, not with any cold, and then the buck was there. He did not come into sight; he was just there, looking not like a ghost but as if all of light were condensed in him and he were the source of it, not only moving in it but disseminating it, already running, seen first as you always see the deer, in that split second after he has already seen you, already slanting away in that first soaring bound, the antlers even in that dim light looking like a small rocking-chair balanced on his head.