“Now,” Sam said, “shoot quick and slow.”
I don’t remember that shot at all. I don’t even remember what I did with the gun afterward. I was running, then I was standing over him where he lay on the wet ground still in the attitude of running and not looking at all dead. I was shaking and jerking again and Sam was beside me and I had his knife in my hand.
“Don’t walk up to him in front,” Sam said. “If he ain’t dead he will cut you all to pieces with his feet. Walk up to him from behind and take him by the horn.”
And I did that—drew the throat taut by one of the antlers and drew Sam’s knife across it, and Sam stooped and dipped his hands in the hot blood and wiped them back and forth across my face. Then he blew his horn and there was a moiling of dogs about us with Jimbo and Boon Hogganbeck driving them back after they had all had a taste of the blood. Then father and Major de Spain sitting the horses, and Walter Ewell with his rifle which never missed, from the barrel of which all the bluing had long since been worn away, were looking down at us—at the old man of seventy who had been a Negro for two generations now but whose face and bearing were still those of the Chickasaw chief, and the white boy of twelve with the prints of the bloody hands across his face, who now had nothing to do but stand straight and not let the shaking show.
“Did he do all right, Sam?” father said.
“He done all right,” Sam Fathers said.
We were the white boy, not yet a man, whose grandfather had lived in the same country and in almost the same manner as the boy himself would grow up to live, leaving his descendants in the land in his turn, and the old man past seventy whose grandfathers had owned the land long before the white men ever saw it and who had vanished from it now with all their kind, what of blood they had left behind them running now in another race and for a while even in bondage and now drawing toward the end of its alien course, barren. Because Sam Fathers had no children.
His grandfather was Ikkemotubbe himself, who had named himself Doom. Sam told me about that—how Ikkemotubbe, old Issetibbeha’s sister’s son, had run away to New Orleans in his youth and returned seven years later to the plantation in north Mississippi, with a French companion called the Chevalier Soeur-Blonde de Vitry, who must have been the Ikkemotubbe of his family too and who was already addressing Ikkemotubbe as Du Homme, and the slave woman who was to be Sam’s grandmother, and a gold-laced hat and coat and a wicker basket containing a litter of puppies and a gold snuffbox of white powder. And how he was met at the river by two or three companions of his bachelor youth, and with the light of a smoking torch glinting on the gold-laced hat and coat, Doom took one of the puppies from the basket and put a pinch of the white powder from the gold box on its tongue, and at once the puppy ceased to be a puppy. And how the next day the eight-year-old son of Doom’s cousin, Moketubbe, who was now hereditary head of the clan (Issetibbeha was now dead) died suddenly, and that afternoon Doom, in the presence of Moketubbe and most of the others (the People, Sam always called them), took another puppy from the basket and put a pinch of the powder on its tongue, and so Moketubbe abdicated and Doom became in fact the Man which his French friend already called him. And how Doom married the slave woman, already pregnant, to one of the slaves which he had just inherited—hence Sam Fathers’ name, which in Chickasaw had been Had-Two-Fathers—and later sold them both and the child too (his own son) to my great-grandfather almost a hundred years ago.
Up to three years ago he had lived on our farm four miles from Jefferson, though all he ever did was what blacksmithing and carpentering was needed. And he lived among Negroes, in a cabin among the other cabins, he consorted with them and dressed like them and talked like them and went to a Negro church now and then. But for all that, he was still the grandson of that Indian chief and the Negroes knew it. Boon Hogganbeck’s grandmother had been a Chickasaw woman too, and although the blood had run white since and Boon was a white man, it was not a chief’s blood. You could see the difference at once when you saw them together, and even Boon seemed to know that the difference was there—even Boon, to whom in his tradition it had never occurred that anyone might be better born than himself. A man might be smarter, he admitted that, or richer (luckier, he called it) but not better born. He was a mastiff, absolutely faithful to father and Major de Spain, absolutely dependent upon them for his very bread, hardy, courageous enough, a slave to all the appetites and almost unrational. It was Sam Fathers who bore himself, not only toward father but toward all white men, with gravity and dignity and without servility or recourse to that impenetrable wall of ready and easy mirth which Negroes sustain between themselves and white men, bearing himself toward father not only as one man to another but as an older man to a younger one.
He taught me the woods, to hunt, when to shoot and when not to shoot, when to kill and when not to kill, and better, what to do with it afterward. Then he would talk to me, the two of us sitting under the close fierce stars on a summer hilltop while we waited for the dogs to return within hearing behind the red or gray fox they ran, or beside a fire in the November or December woods while the dogs worked out a coon’s trail along the creek, or fireless in the pitch dark and the heavy dew of April mornings while we waited for daylight beneath a turkey roost. I would not question him; he did not react to questions. I would just wait and then listen and he would begin, talking about the old days and the People whom he had never known, and so could not remember himself, and in place of whom the other race into which his blood had run had supplied him with no substitute.
And as he talked about those old times and those dead and vanished men of another race from either that I knew, gradually those old times would cease to be old times and would become the present, now, not only as if they had happened yesterday but as if they were still happening and some of them had not even happened yet but would occur to-morrow, so that at last it would seem as if I myself had not come into existence yet, that none of my race nor the other race which we had brought into the land with us had come here yet; that although it had been my grandfather’s and was now my father’s and someday would be my land which we hunted over and now rested upon, our hold upon it actually was as trivial and without reality as that now faded and archaic script in one of the Chancery Clerk’s books in the courthouse in town, and that it was I who was the guest here and Sam Fathers’ voice the mouthpiece of the host.
Until three years ago there had been two of them, the other a full-blood Chickasaw, in a sense even more astonishingly lost than Sam Fathers. He called himself Jobaker, as if it were one word. Nobody knew his history at all. He was a hermit, he lived in a foul little shack at the forks of the creek four or five miles from our farm and about that far from any other habitation. He was a market hunter and fisherman and he consorted with nobody, black or white; no Negro would even cross his path and no man dared approach his hut except Sam, and perhaps once a month I would find the two of them in Sam’s shop—two old men squatting on their heels on the dirt floor, talking in a mixture of negroid English and flat hill dialect and now and then a phrase of that old tongue which as time went on and I squatted there too listening, I began to learn. Then he died. That is, nobody had seen him in some time. Then one morning Sam Fathers was missing, none of the Negroes knew when nor where, until that night when some Negroes possum-hunting saw the sudden burst of flames and approached them. It was Joe Baker’s hut, but before they got anywhere near it someone shot toward them. It was Sam, but nobody ever found Joe Baker’s grave.
Two days after that Sam walked to town and came to father’s office. I was there when he walked in without knocking and stood there—the Indian, with the Indian face for all the nigger clothes.
“I want to go,” he said. “I want to go to the big bottom to live.”
“To live?” father said.
“You can fix it with Major de Spain,” Sam said. “I could live in the camp and take care of it for you all. Or I could build me a little house.” For a little while they both looked at
each other, he and father. Then father said:
“All right. I’ll fix it.” And Sam went out, and that was all.
I was nine then; it seemed perfectly natural to me that nobody, not even father, would argue with Sam any more than I would. But I could not understand it.
“If Joe Baker’s dead like they say,” I said, “and Sam hasn’t got anybody any more at all kin to him, why does he want to go into the big bottom, where he won’t ever see anybody except us for a few days in the fall while we are hunting?”
Father looked at me. It was not a curious look, it was just thoughtful. I didn’t notice it then. I did not remember it until later. Then he quit looking at me.
“Maybe that’s what he wants,” he said.
So Sam moved. He owned so little that he could carry it. He walked. He would neither let father send him in the wagon nor would he take one of the mules. He was just gone one morning, the cabin vacant in which he had lived for years yet in which there never had been very much, the shop standing idle now in which there never had been very much to do. Each November we would go into the big bottom, to the camp—Major de Spain and father and Walter Ewell and Boon and Uncle Ike McCaslin and two or three others, with Jimbo and Uncle Ash to cook, and the dogs. Sam would be there; if he was glad to see us he did not show it. If he regretted to see us depart again he did not show that. Each morning he would go out to my stand with me before the dogs were cast. It would be one of the poorer stands of course, since I was only nine and ten and eleven and I had never even seen a deer running yet. But we would stand there. Sam a little behind me and without a gun himself, as he had stood when I shot the running rabbit when I was eight years old; we would stand there in the November dawns and after a while we would hear the dogs. Sometimes they would sweep up and past, close, belling and invisible; once we heard the five heavy reports of Boon’s old pump gun with which he had never killed anything larger than a rabbit or a squirrel, and that sitting, and twice we heard from our stand the flat unreverberant clap of Walter Ewell’s rifle which never missed, so that you did not even wait to hear his horn.
“I’ll never get a shot,” I said. “I’ll never kill one.”
“Yes you will,” Sam said. “You wait. You’ll be a hunter. You’ll be a man.”
And we would leave him there. He would go out to the road where the surrey would be waiting in order to take the horses and mules back; for now that he lived at the camp all the time, father and Major de Spain left the horses and the dogs there. They would go on ahead on the horses and Uncle Ash and Jimbo and I would follow in the wagon with Sam, with the guns and the bedding and the meat and the heads, the antlers, the good ones, the wagon winding on among the tremendous gums and cypresses and oaks where no axe had ever sounded, between the impenetrable brakes of cane and brier—the two changing yet constant walls just beyond which the wilderness seemed to lean, stooping a little, watching us and listening; not quite inimical because we were too small, our sojourn too brief and too harmless to excite to that, just brooding, secret, almost inattentive. Then we would emerge, we would be out of it, the line as sharp as the demarcation of a doored wall. Suddenly skeletoned cotton- and corn-fields would flow away on either hand, gaunt and motionless beneath the gray rain; there would be a house, barns, where the hand of man had clawed for an instant, holding, the wall of the wilderness behind us now, tremendous and still and seemingly impenetrable in the gray and fading light. The surrey would be waiting, father and Major de Spain and Uncle Ike dismounted beside it. Then Sam would get down from the wagon and mount one of the horses and, with the others at lead behind him, he would turn back. I would watch him for a while against that tall and secret wall, growing smaller and smaller against it. He would not look back. Then he would enter it, returning to what I believed, and thought that father believed, was his loneliness and solitude.
So the instant came; I pulled trigger and ceased to be a child forever and became a hunter and a man. It was the last day. We broke camp that afternoon and went out, father and Major de Spain and Uncle Ike and Boon on the horses and mules, Walter Ewell and old Ash and Jimbo and I in the wagon with Sam and the duffel and my hide and antlers. There could have been other trophies in the wagon too but I should not have known it, just as for all practical purposes Sam Fathers and I were still alone together as we had been that morning, the wagon winding and jolting on between those shifting yet constant walls from beyond which the wilderness watched us passing, less than inimical now and never inimical again since my buck still and forever leaped, the shaking gun-barrels coming constantly and forever steady at last, crashing, and still out of his moment of mortality the buck sprang, forever immortal, that moment of the buck, the shot, Sam Fathers and myself and the blood with which he had marked me forever, one with the wilderness which had now accepted me because Sam had said that I had done all right; the wagon winding on, when suddenly Sam checked it and we all heard that unforgettable and unmistakable sound of a deer breaking cover.
Then Boon shouted from beyond the bend of the trail and while we all sat motionless in the halted wagon, Walter and I already reaching for our guns, Boon came galloping back, flogging his mule with his hat, his face wild and amazed as he shouted down at us. Then father and the others came round the bend.
“Get the dogs!” Boon cried. “Get the dogs! If he had a nub on his head, he had fourteen points! Laying right there in that pawpaw thicket! If I’d a knowed he was there, I could a cut his throat with my pocket knife!”
“Maybe that’s why he run,” Walter said. “He saw you never had your gun.” He was already out of the wagon, with his rifle. Then I was out too with my gun, and father and Major de Spain and Uncle Ike had come up and Boon got off his mule somehow and was scrabbling among the duffel for his gun, still shouting, “Get the dogs! Get the dogs!” And it seemed to me too that it would take them forever to decide what to do—the old men in whom the blood ran cold and slow, in whom during the intervening years between us the blood had become a different and colder substance from that which ran in me and even in Boon and Walter.
“What about it, Sam?” father said. “Could the dogs bring him back?”
“We won’t need the dogs,” Sam said. “If he don’t hear dogs behind him he will circle back in here about sundown to bed.”
“All right,” Major de Spain said. “You boys take the horses. We’ll go on out to the road in the wagon and wait there.” So he and father and Uncle Ike got into the wagon, and Boon and Walter and Sam and I took the horses and turned back and out of the trail. We rode for about an hour, through the gray and unmarked afternoon whose light was little different from what it had been at dawn and which would become darkness without any graduation. Then Sam stopped us.
“This is far enough,” he said. “He’ll be coming upwind, and he don’t want to smell the mules.”
So we dismounted and tied them and followed Sam on foot through the markless afternoon, through the unpathed woods.
“You got time,” Sam said to me once. “We’ll get there before he does.”
So I tried to go slower. That is, I tried to slow, decelerate, the dizzy rush of time in which the buck which I had not even seen was moving, which it seemed to me was carrying him farther and farther and more and more irretrievably away from us even though there were no dogs behind him to make him run yet. So we went on; it seemed to me that it was for another hour. Then suddenly we were on a ridge. I had never been in there before and you could not see the ridge; you just knew that the earth had risen slightly because the undergrowth had thinned a little and the ground which you could not see slanted, sloping away toward a dense brake of cane.
“This is it,” Sam said. “You all follow the ridge and you will come to two crossings. You can see the tracks.”
Boon and Walter went on. Soon they had disappeared, and once more Sam and I were standing motionless in a clump of switchlike bushes against the trunk of a pin oak, and again there was nothing, as in the morning. There was the soaring
and somber solitude in the dim light, there was the thin whisper of the faint cold rain which had not ceased all day; then, as if it had waited for us to find our positions and become still, the wilderness breathed again. It seemed to lean inward above us, above Walter, and Boon, and Sam and me in our separate lurking-places, tremendous, attentive, impartial, and omniscient, the buck moving in it too somewhere, not running since he had not been pursued, not frightened and never fearsome but just alert too as we were alert, perhaps already circling back, perhaps quite near, conscious too of the eye of the ancient immortal Umpire. Because I was just twelve then, and that morning something had happened to me: in less than a second I had ceased forever to be the child I was yesterday. Or perhaps this made no difference, perhaps even a city-bred man, let alone a child, could not have understood it; perhaps only a country-bred one could comprehend loving the life he spills. I began to shake again.
“I’m glad it’s started now,” I whispered. “Then it will be gone when I raise the gun—”
“Hush,” Sam said.
“Is he that near?” I whispered. We did not move to speak: only our lips shaping the expiring words. “Do you think—”
“Hush,” Sam said. So I hushed. But I could not stop the shaking. I did not try, because I knew that it would go away when I needed the steadiness, since Sam Fathers had already made me a hunter. So we stood there, motionless, scarcely breathing. If there had been any sun it would be near to setting now; there was a condensing, a densifying, of what I thought was the gray and unchanging light until I realized it was my own breathing, my heart, my blood—something, and that Sam had marked me indeed with something he had had of his vanished and forgotten people. Then I stopped breathing, there was only my heart, my blood, and in the following silence the wilderness ceased to breathe too, leaning, stooping overhead with held breath, tremendous and impartial and waiting. Then the shaking stopped too, as I had known it would, and I slipped the safety off the gun.