Hunting stories & stories told about hunting: what Isaac McCaslin thinks he learns in the Big Woods.

Thomas, Harry

LIKE ISAAC MCCASLIN, I AM A WHITE SOUTHERNER WHO WAS DRAGGED TO the woods as a boy and taught to hunt. Unlike Ike, my hunger for education in the subject was hardly without end. I hunted quail in South Georgia rather than bear in Mississippi, but when Faulkner, in Go Down, Moses, writes of the hunter's "loving the life he spills" (175), I am suddenly back in familiar, if uncomfortable, territory. Given some adjustments in years and geography and game of choice, that could be my father talking. (1)

But what, I wonder now as I wondered all those years ago, is the point of hunting? What exactly are Southern boys being taken to the woods in order to learn? And what might hunting have to do with Ike McCaslin's oft-debated decision regarding his inheritance? The answer, I think, lies in how sportive (as opposed to subsistence) hunters think about nature.

One of the reasons Ike loves hunting is that it takes place outside of cities, in wild places. He has a lifelong love affair with "wilderness ... the tangle of brier and cane impenetrable even to sight twenty feet away, the tall tremendous soaring of oak and gum and ash and hickory which had rung to no axe save the hunter's" (326) because he believes that he is in a different world when he is in the woods. Ike thinks of the places he hunts as the home of "the wild immortal spirit" which "white [men were] fatuous enough to believe [they] had bought any fragment of" (184, 183). Having hardly known his mother and having been scorned by his wife, Ike sees the land he hunts as both "the mother who had shaped him ... [and] his mistress and wife" (311). Thinking of himself as both born of and married to the Mississippi wilderness, Ike feels he belongs to the innocent world of nature rather than the corrupt world of man with its plantations "founded upon injustice and erected by ruthless rapacity" (285).

The inheritance Ike refuses in the fourth section of "The Bear" is one of these plantations, but however noble Ike's gesture may seem, his devout belief that the Big Woods are the flip-side of human culture, a belief encoded within the value system of sportive hunting, blinds him to the fact that "the ancient and immitigable rules" (184) governing the hunt and the life of the hunting camp are the same rules that govern the Southern ruling class culture he comes to so despise. And as the events of "Delta Autumn" show, the behavioral codes of sportive hunting, in which Ike sees an alternative to the exploitation he is heir to, cause him to be both condescending and cruel to Roth Edmunds's mixed-race mistress. By behaving like the hunter he is, Ike proves just how thoroughly he is trapped within the very culture that he thought hunting had allowed him to escape. Thus nature/culture becomes another seemingly fixed binary, like black/white or male/female, that Faulkner's fiction destabilizes under our feet.

Hunting, for Ike and other men of his class, is not a necessity. They may savor the taste of "the wild strange meat, venison and bear and turkey and coon ... which men ate" (188) but they do not depend on such meat to survive. Very clearly, they are not the same kind of white men as the "swampers" who show up in "The Bear," the "gaunt malaria-ridden men ... who ran trap-lines for coons ... in clothes but little better than Sam Fathers' and nowhere near as good as Tennie's Jim's" (213). The swampers hunt because they need to eat; they are what Alabama sportsman Johnson J. Hooper derisively calls "the pot-hunter" in his 1856 hunting manual Dog and Gun. To sportive hunters like Hooper, pot-hunters are as lowly and unworthy of respect as "the clown who nets or traps what he cannot fairly kill" (9).

For the upper classes, hunting has more to do with social class than with subsistence. Hunting--and killing--make a man of Ike, who serves an "apprenticeship in miniature to manhood" while in the woods (187). As Southern historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown explains,

 more than labor in the field, more than consultations about family
 policies, sport welcomed the young adult son into the fraternity of
 manhood. Sport, most especially hunting, introduced the youth to
 his father's friends, a fellowship of men with its special
 vocabulary ... the ritual gossip of dogs, guns and obstacles
 overcome to kill game--"the best of all breathing and forever the
 best of all listening," as Faulkner described it in "The Bear."
 (195-196)

Whatever pleasures Ike may find in the woods, his time there also grooms him for his entry into Southern ruling class manhood. (2)

And while the hunt involves killing, that killing is not wanton. As Ike practices it, hunting is not a simple exercise in violence. The men do not march into the woods and kill as much game as they can, as quickly as they can. Instead their actions in the woods are deliberate, almost ritualistic. Faulkner even describes Old Ben as "the bear which they did not even intend to kill" (186). The "men--the true hunters" (158) observe a complex code of behavior when they are in the woods. There are rules about when they can hunt, what they can hunt, and how they may hunt it. Major de Spain himself alludes to this code of conduct (which in his view, all residents of the big woods, human and animal alike, must obey) after he discovers that Old Ben has killed one of his colts:

 It was Old Ben ... I'm disappointed in him. He has broken the
 rules. I didn't think he would have done that. He has killed mine
 and McCaslin's dogs, but that was all right. We gambled the dogs
 against him; we gave each other warning. But now he has come into
 my house and destroyed my property, out of season too. He broke the
 rules. (205)

The rules Major de Spain refers to are the rules of hunting, of gentlemanly sportsmanship. In the preface of his Cultural Values in the Southern Sporting Narrative, Jacob F. Rivers III says that such rules--the dos and don'ts of hunting--are part of "the aristocratic code of southern sportsmanship" (x). Since Ike and the white men of Go Down, Moses hunt neither to eat nor to kill wantonly, the code Rivers identifies answers the question of why they hunt. Faulkner's hunters go to the big woods to perform, maintain, and test themselves against this aristocratic code of Southern sportsmanship.

Contained within that code is the belief that nature and culture are two very separate places. Early on in "The Bear," Ike describes the land he hunts as being locked in a pitched battle against mankind's corrupt civilization and ruinous technology. The Delta wilderness, for Ike, is "doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness" (185). When Ike is assigned to supervise Boon Hogganbeck on his trip to Memphis, the two hunters seem as though they would rather be on the moon than in the city where "the high buildings and the hard pavements, the fine carriages and the horse cars and the men in starched collars and neckties made their boots and khaki look a little rougher and a little muddier" (221). Being in the woods instills Ike with "a sense of his own [human] fragility and impotence against the timeless woods," and he must shed technology, the calling card of civilization, in order to earn his audience with Old Ben: while wearing his watch and his compass in the woods, Ike feels "tainted" (192, 199). As he ages, Ike's perception of the nature/civilization divide grows only stronger, so that in the fifth section of "The Bear" he sees the woods as a "wall of wilderness ... within which he would be able to hide himself away" from the spread of civilization symbolized by the railroad and the "new planing-mill already half completed" (304, 303).

Looking at how hunters write about hunting, it hardly seems surprising that Ike feels this way; the rules and mores of sportive hunting depend on a consideration of culture and nature as opposing places. The rhetoric of hunting figures the hunt as a voyage out of one world (culture) into another (nature), and there can be little doubt which of the two worlds is preferred. In The American Sportsman, Elisha J. Lewis suggests that one of hunting's chief virtues is its ability to transport men beyond the troubled lives they live in cities:

 Is there not a time when the wan-faced student of science may
 neglect for awhile the sickly flickerings of the midnight lamp?....
 Yes! There is a time ... when even the anxious, upright, and
 enterprising merchant may, for a brief period, while quaffing, as
 it were, the fabled waters of the Lethe, forget the perplexities of
 commerce.... to the fields then,--to the bright and beautiful
 fields,--with 'dog and gun,' do we invite you. (xxiii)

Here the life and business of cities are cast as necessary evils, poison best taken in small doses. Spanish philosopher (and hunter) Jose Ortega y Gasser echoes this distrust of city living in his Meditations on Hunting "Man, projected by his inevitable progress away from his ancestral proximity to animals, vegetables, and minerals--in sum, to Nature--takes pleasure in the artificial return to it, the only occupation that permits him something like a vacation from his human condition" (111). (3) Picking up on this kind of rhetoric, Rivers says that the Southern sporting code "consistently demands the highest standards of ethical, responsible conduct toward both society and the natural world" (ix). As his words imply, the rules of this code are based on a way of thinking which figures nature and society as separate spaces.

And after a childhood immersed in sportive hunting's thinking about nature and culture, Ike comes to believe that the land should be held "mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood" rather than hoarded for the accumulation of a private fortune built on the backs of enslaved blacks, disposed Native Americans and a ravaged natural landscape (246). Some of Ike's early critics thought his repudiation of his inheritance made him a hero, a boy who went deep into the woods and found a natural world there that stood as an alternative to the corrupt culture of his ancestors. (4) From the early 1960s forward, however, critics have generally seen Ike's life (and his repudiation) as a failure. (5) What both camps have in common is the concession that the woods Ike hunts are crucial to the development of his worldview. Whether Ike is seen as nobly upholding the values he learned in the woods or somehow tragically misinterpreting them, Nature with a capital N plays a crucial role in almost all readings of his life. But as David H. Evans points out when he critiques Ike's critics, "What all of these arguments take for granted is that nature, in fact, exists" (179).

Evans' point is that almost all readings of "The Bear" have been dependent on a conceptual binary: the assumption that there is nature and that there is civilization/culture and that the two are separate, diametrically opposed spaces. Evans, referencing the work of Simon Schama, argues that this binary is false:

 the concept of the natural landscape is incomprehensible apart from
 the culture that defines it as its own opposite, which constitutes
 it by designating particular pieces of geography as noteworthy,
 investing them with special significance, and enabling their social
 use or appreciation. Nature, that is to say, does not exist without
 culture, and does not exist otherwise than as a cultural category.
 (180)

I agree with Evans. Obviously, there are forests and there are cities and the two look very different, but any moral significance attached to either landscape is fixed there by the minds of human beings. Technology and wilderness in and of themselves are both amoral; it is human beings who use the former and separate the latter into parts to be paved and parts to be venerated; changes in geography do not function as any kind of moral laundromat. The hunting chapters of Go Dawn, Moses prove that however deeply Ike goes into the woods, his journeys into them begin in society. The white hunters Ike admires so greatly do not leave their culturally constructed beliefs on the outside of the woods.

In particular, white Southern culture's rules of race are strictly observed in the woods. White men such as Ike's cousin "McCaslin ["Cass" Edmonds] ... would mount to the seat" of the wagon, while black men like Tennie's Jim make the trip "sitting on the dog-crate" (163). Once in camp, the black men cook and run the hunting camp while the white men enjoy their leisure time in the woods. When Ike rises "at three" in the morning, it is Tennie's Jim--already awake himself--who rouses him (217). Camp cook Ash is allowed to hunt a deer once, but the role he plays in the field is that of comic relief. The untrained hunter and his mismatched collection of shotgun shells does not challenge the authority of the white hunters because Ike "knew that Ash, who had spent two weeks of his life in the camp each year for the last twenty, had no idea whatever where they were" in the field (309-10). (6)

Half Native American and half black, Sam Fathers's mastery of hunting allows him to occupy a special place both in and outside of the woods. This place is not quite black but not equal to white either. Sam's knowledge of the woods is used in service of the rich white men, whose boys (Ike and Cass before him) he teaches to hunt. But despite whatever reverence the men (and particularly Ike) may feel towards Sam, he is not treated as an equal, even in the woods where he is undisputedly wiser than any other man. He may sit on the seat of the wagon next to McCaslin Edmonds during the hunt, but when he collapses during the hunters' final confrontation with Old Ben, it is the wounded mongrel dog, Lion, that Boon first carries to the skiff headed back to camp. Only after their prize dog is secured do Ike and Boon carry Sam down to the same skiff (232). Similarly, Sam is the last member of the hunting party to receive medical treatment from the doctor the hunters summon to camp. After the men lay Sam in his hut and leave him, Ike thinks that "Sam's eyes were probably open again on that profound look which saw further than them or the hut, further than the death of a bear and the dying of a dog" (235, emphasis mine), but this vision of Sam's suffering, or lack thereof, is a product of Ike's imagination, not fact. Ike invents this scene of Sam's wise and peaceful dying while he himself stands in the main camp. Whatever Ike imagines, Sam himself is actually lying in his hut, waiting until a dog is treated before he receives medical attention.

The power structures which exist in and around the plantation houses of Yoknapatawpha County do not wither away and disappear inside the big woods; the men who go to the camp to hunt each November carry their privileges and prejudices in with them, quite intact. The idea that the men who hunt the woods become "men, not white nor black nor red but men, hunters" is a myth (184). As Evans says, "It seems, therefore, rather difficult to accept at face value the hunter's claim to have left civilization behind.... the game of the hunt is not so much an alternative to the codes that prevail outside the forest as it is their symbolic extension" (187). The disintegration of race in the wilderness is a story that the members of Yoknapatawpha's ruling class like to tell themselves, not a fact.

Another story sportive hunters tell has to do with responsibility: the pleasures serious hunters find in the woods come along with a demanding responsibility to those woods. "A good hunter's way of hunting is a hard job which demands much from man," writes Ortega, "It involves a complete code of ethics of the most distinguished design ... hunting resembles the monastic rule and the military order" (31). The groups Ortega compares hunters to are protectors of souls and nations, and sportive hunting asks its participants to look after the natural world in a similar way. In tracing the origins of sportive hunting, Rivers says that "Paleolithic hunters," whose main source of food was hunted game, "lived within a self-imposed moral order that posited a universe of which man not only was a part, but one toward which he was obligated to conduct himself responsibly if he meant to survive" (xi). Sportsmen, the descendents of these early hunters, see themselves as stewards of the natural world, not just travelers through it.

Isaac McCaslin is just such a sportsman: The land "belonged to all," he thinks after a lifetime spent hunting, "they had only to use it well, humbly and with pride" (337). Being a steward of something is, of course, a responsibility. And the existence of stewards implies the existence of those who are stewarded over; it implies a hierarchy where members of a privileged class of people are considered wise and powerful enough to be entrusted with protecting those who are less wise and less powerful. The work of a steward may be difficult indeed, but it is work that only a select few are good enough to be called to do. In his Romance of Natural History (1852), C. W. Webber explicitly says that hunting calls hunters to be stewards of the natural world:

 Our dominion over the beast of the earth and the fowl of the air
 becomes a heritage of fearful responsibilities.... we are no
 longer their tyrants, but right royal masters.... [they are] the
 creatures of our dedicated love, to be guarded gently, nurtured
 well, and led by easy ways up, through serener airs, to happier
 fields. (36)

It is worth reiterating here that Rivers calls the Southern sporting code he identifies "aristocratic" and admits that it calls for "honor, fair play and noblesse oblige" (ix). What should be obvious at this point is a link between the rhetoric of sportive hunting and the social delusions of the South's Reconstruction-era planter class. Specifically, I refer to what W. J. Cash calls "the cult of the Great Southern Heart," the post-1865 insistence that "The Old South [was] not only the happy country but the happier country especially for the Negro. The lash? A lie, sir; it had never existed. The only bonds [between blacks and whites] were those of tender understanding, trust and loyalty" (128). It is not difficult to imagine that Webber's rhapsodic musings about the rule of man over animals could be employed, almost without change, by a Reconstructionera planter expressing his relationship to his former slaves.

Human beings, specifically those skilled enough to be called hunters, are nobles in the sporting worldview, just as human beings, specifically those fortunate enough to be born into the planter class, are nobles in the Southern ruling class worldview. These nobles are stewards of their respective worlds, leaders and protectors of them. And so the world Ike wants to escape into is, in some ways, not so different from the world he wishes to escape from. The world of the hunt and the world of the plantation are both structured hierarchically, and both allow for inequalities that are considered necessary and natural. Ike himself proves as much when, as a young boy, he is given "the poorest [deer stand], the most barren" but "expected" no different due to his place within the hierarchy of the hunting camp (188). Ortega says that "the authenticity of the hunt, its essential structure ... is a matter of a confrontation between two unequal species. The real care that man must exercise is not in pretending to make the beast equal to him, because that is a stupid utopia, a beatific farce, but rather in avoiding more and more the excess of his superiority" (97). Sportive hunting, then, abhors only the abuse of power and responsibility, not the existence of the hierarchies that bestow power and responsibility on one group while denying it to others.

This illuminates the standard readings of Ike's repudiation. Again relying on the nature/society divide, Rivers thinks that

 the impractically idealistic code of moral conduct that Isaac
 adopts is not learned within the context of the fallen and
 compromised world of civilization but rather in the untainted
 innocence of nature. In this mystical and prehistoric realm, the
 virtues of honor, courage and justice can manifest themselves in
 the graceful perfection of unblemished form.... [Ike] wants
 desperately to impose their Edenic imperatives onto his
 postlapsarian world. His dreams, of course, can never come true ...
 his flawed society will not support the tremendous burdens of moral
 perfection that he would impose upon them. (114-15)

Although Rivers does admit that Ike fails in his quest to cleanse himself of moral taint, his reading is otherwise fairly typical: Ike leaves the world of man for the world of nature, glimpses innocence and perfection, goes home to the world of man, glimpses his family's plantation ledgers and cannot stand to be heir to such wickedness.

Before one accepts this reading, it is worth considering what exactly Ike sees in his family's ledgers. By the time he gets to be sixteen and looks in the ledgers, he already knows that his family had owned slaves. He was born in the South in 1867; he grew up during Reconstruction, amidst the bitter aftermath of a bloody war fought (in part) to end slavery ("McCaslin Genealogy"). He grew up living near black sharecroppers, many of whom had been the slaves of his father and grandfather. Faulkner himself even tells us that Ike "knew what he was going to find" in the ledgers "before he found it" (257). What he finds within them is circumstantial evidence of his grandfather's having sired a daughter with one of his slaves, and then a son with his own slave-daughter. (7)

This--his grandfather's miscegenation and incest--is what is news to Ike, not slavery. His grandfather's treatment of his slaves (and his own child), not slavery itself, is what tortures Ike when he thinks "His own daughter His own daughter. No No Not even him" (259). What so deeply offends Ike is his grandfather's abuse of power, the use of his supposedly noble position for ignoble actions. He never questions why his grandfather should have been considered a noble while other human beings were designated slaves. This makes sense, given Ike's love of sportive hunting, in which life is viewed as "a terrible conflict" where "every animal is in a relationship of superiority or inferiority with regard to every other. Strict equality is exceedingly improbable and anomalous" (Ortega 98). It is not that Ike has learned purity and innocence in the woods and then been repulsed by the fallen world of mankind. What hunting has taught him is stewardship for the woods and its creatures, a naturalistic sort of noblesse oblige. And if hunting allows Ike to see himself as a steward of the natural world, his upbringing in the world of man teaches him that white men of his class are the stewards of blacks.

The Southern plantation system that Isaac McCaslin's forebears ruled over was enormously labor dependent, and the type of labor it called for was inordinately difficult. Thus, slaves were needed, and the doctrine of white supremacy went to great lengths inventing and propagating the idea of fundamental (biological, genetic) differences between whites and blacks, because if blacks were not quite human, then slavery was not so objectionable (Zinn 23-38).

This fiction of fundamental difference between whites and blacks along with another great Southern story, the myth of Southern ruling class aristocracy, created a powerful sense of racial paternalism in whites and thus enabled them to see slavery as a good thing, part of a savage-civilizing mission that they, being fully human, were entrusted with. As Cash notes, the Civil War and its aftermath only made the paternalism felt by ruling class Southerners towards their neighbors stronger. Coming home after having lead Confederate troops in battle, Southern men of the planter class

 were more set in the custom of command, much more perfectly
 schooled in the art of it, knew better how to handle the commoner,
 to steer expertly around his recalcitrance, to manipulate him
 without ever arousing his jealous independence. They had observed
 more intimately the responsibility which the conditions of the Old
 South had imprinted upon the commoner--were certain now that he was
 inherently a child, requiring to be looked after. (111-12)

And if the common white Southerner was a child, what then could black Southerners be but something even more helpless?

Despite his outrage at his grandfather's actions and his conviction that "the whole South ... is cursed" (266), despite his repudiation of the family plantation, Ike behaves exactly like a Southern man of his race and class would be expected to when he is faced with Roth Edmonds's mixed-race mistress in "Delta Autumn." When Roth, Cass Edmonds's grandson and the current head of the family plantation, leaves an envelope full of money with Ike and says that someone will be coming by the hunting camp to collect it, Ike is furious with him. "What did you promise her that you haven't got the courage to face her and retract?" he asks, piqued that Roth would conduct himself in a manner so ungentlemanly (339). But Ike is not truly horrified until the unnamed mistress appears with her and Roth's illegitimate child on her arm and mentions that her aunt used to take in washing.

 "Took in what?" [Ike replies]. "Took in washing?" He sprang, still
 seated even, flinging himself backward onto one arm, awry-haired,
 glaring. Now he understood what it was she had brought into the
 tent with her, what old Isham had already told him by sending the
 youth to bring her in to him--the pale lips, the skin pallid and
 dead-looking yet not ill, the dark and tragic and foreknowing eyes.
 Maybe in a thousand or two thousand years in America, he thought.
 But not now! Not now! He cried, not loud, in a voice of amazement,
 pity and outrage: "You're a nigger!" (344)

Ike mistakenly thinks that Roth's mistress is white, and when this illusion is shattered, the enormity of what Roth has done begins to dawn on him. The final straw comes when the mistress reveals that she too is a member of the McCaslin family: her grandfather was James "Tennie's Jim" Beauchamp, whose father was Terrel "Tomey's Turl" Beauchamp, who was himself the product of Ike's grandfather's incest with his own slave-daughter ("McCaslin Family Genealogy"). Roth has thus repeated the sins of his forbearer--incest and miscegenation--and the cycle of immorality Ike so detests seems to have come full circle.

After calling her a nigger, Ike does try to help Roth's mistress. In addition to the money Roth left for her, Ike gives her his hunting horn, "the one which General Compson had left him in his will, covered with the unbroken skin from a buck's shank and bound with silver" (346). He then tells her to "Go back North. Marry a man in your own race. That's the only salvation for you--for a while yet, maybe a long while yet. We will have to wait" (346).

Although he has given her one of his most prized possessions (and a symbol of the hunting so important to him), Ike has done so only after insulting Roth's mistress and urging her into exile. He has attempted to help her, and no doubt thinks that he has made a great sacrifice to do so, but he has not treated her like an equal. Once Ike realizes that Roth's mistress is not fully white, he behaves as though she was a member of another, lesser species. The fiction of white supremacy and the poisonous legacy of racism, which Ike thinks he has renounced, have caused him to see her this way, and his lifetime spent observing the aristocratic code of Southern sportsmanship shapes his interactions with members of lesser species. (8) That code merges with the paternalism of his social class and Ike behaves as Roth's mistress's steward, her implicit superior. He treats her as if she is a pitiful creature who needs tending to or as a problem to be solved, rather than what she is: a fellow human being and a family member.

After Roth's mistress has gone, Ike lies on his cot in the hunting camp tent and looks back bitterly over the failure that is his life:

 This Delta he thought: This Delta. This land which man has
 deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that
 white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis
 ... where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers
 crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and
 grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and
 mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African
 and Aryan and few, all breed and spawn together until no man has
 time to say which one is which nor cares.... No wonder the mined
 woods I used to know dont cry for retribution! he thought: The
 people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge. (347)

In this increasingly incoherent and ugly inner monologue, Ike's fears reflect his preoccupations, chief among which is miscegenation. He uses the word nigger in his rant and makes distinctions between rich and poor men both white and black. But it is not the existence of these distinct social groups that pains Ike, it is their intermixing, their "spawn[ing] together." Cultural fictions about race have tricked Ike into seeing divisions within his own species, have fooled him into thinking some human beings are less human than others and thus need warding over. Looking at the world through hunter's eyes, he is not worried by divisions or inequalities between species: just the blurring or disappearance of those divisions and the misbehavior of men, such as his grandfather and Roth Edmonds, who sit rightfully atop the natural order.

If "The Old People" and "The Bear" show an Isaac McCaslin who figures hunting as the process through which he encounters moral purity and achieves salvation from the South's immoral past, then "Delta Autumn" must undercut that reading. The innocence and anti-society Ike thinks he finds in the woods is a myth, a self-constructed delusion. The racism Ike thinks he has freed himself from causes him to misuse sportive hunting's rules of predator-prey interaction and apply them to another human being.

Ike knows the way his grandfather treated his slaves was wrong, but he cannot bring himself to see blacks and whites as being equal. Because he sees a prelapsarian innocence in the world of nature and because hunting is the way he enters that nature, Ike's racism causes him to see himself as a savior, a shepherd of sorts. (9) Ike renounces his birthright not because his grandfather held slaves but because of how his grandfather treated those slaves. By accepting the fiction of Southern aristocracy and the fiction of white supremacy, Ike has come to see blacks as another species, a lesser species which he--as a noble--must look after with care and stewardship but never equality.

This leaves Ike in a state of moral and political stasis. He can feel guilt about his familial legacy and he can performatively enact that guilt by forsaking the plantation that is his to inherit, but he cannot bring himself to work for change. This paralysis of the present Ike suffers from might also be another lesson Ike has learned while hunting. Even Rivers, a great cheerleader of sportive hunting, admits that its practitioners are "backward-looking instead of progressively optimistic" (xiv). The sporting tradition Ike sees as an alternative to the sins of the past is actually focused on the past, not the future. It is busily engaged in nostalgia, "a profound sense of cultural and environmental loss, a special kind of backward-looking lament," (10) which Faulkner illustrates when he depicts his hunters "squatting and standing in the warm and drowsing sunlight, talking quietly of hunting, of the game and the dogs which ran it, of hounds and bear and deer and men of yesterday vanished from the earth" (Rivers ix, Faulkner 238). (11)

Ike longs to retreat backwards into an innocent pre-technological, pre-culture natural world which likely never existed for humans. For Ike the human past is unbearable, the present is a product of that past and the future (embodied in technology and cultural modernism) is always something worse. As Rivers explains:

 Instead of trying to "cure" this burden of inherited sin and guilt
 with the virtues he has learned and the power he stands to inherit,
 Isaac himself will only retreat into what he sees as a prelapsarian
 innocence, content to let the rest of the world take care of itself
 as best it can.... he is too much a Rousseau, a guilt-obsessed
 "liberal" type.... he is quite remarkably un-southern ... in his
 abstractionist belief in an earthly, man-willed utopia. (111, 136)

Paralyzed by guilt, Ike does shirk the responsibilities of the present to crawl imaginatively towards a natural world that arguably never existed. (12) But I must point out that guilt-ridden paralysis is not a trait admired by all "liberal" types. As feminist critic Mab Segrest notes in her reading of Faulkner, "Guilt ... perpetuates existing power structures by becoming a substitute for action. Faulkner's politics--for all his caterwauling about doom and gloom and Southern burdens and curses--stink" (28).

And despite his good intentions, so do Ike's. He may refute his plantation, but no matter how deeply he goes into The Big Woods, he carries the privilege and the problems of his social class along with him. Although "The Bear" is often said to be one of the greatest hunting stories ever written, Ike's conduct there and in "Delta Autumn" undercuts the nature/culture binary that sportive hunting depends on. His life may thus be read as a cautionary tale, a warning about how subcultural identification and changes in geography do not allow any of us to sidestep the conditioning of the dominant culture, no matter how badly we might wish otherwise.

Works Cited

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Evans, David H. "Taking the Place of Nature: 'The Bear' and the Incarnation of America." Faulkner and The Natural World." Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1996. Ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. 179-97.

Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. 1942. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

Fisher, Richard E. "The Wilderness, the Commissary, and the Bedroom: Faulkner's Ike McCaslin as a Hero in a Vaccuum." English Studies 44.1 (1963): 19-28.

Hooper, J. Johnson. Dog and Gun; A Few Loose Chapters on Shooting. Among which will be found some Anecdotes and Incidents. 1856. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1992. W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library, The University of Alabama.

Lewis, Elisha J. The American Sportsman: Containing Hints to Sportsmen, Notes on Shooting and the Habits of the Game Birds and Wild Fowl of America. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1857. W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library, The University of Alabama.

Litz, Walton. "William Faulkner's Moral Vision." Southwest Review 37.3 (1952): 200-09.

"The McCaslin Family Genealogy." William Faulkner on the Web. 29 March 2007. <http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/gen-mccaslin.html>

Ortega y Gasser, Jose Meditations on Hunting. 1943. Trans. Howard B. Wescott. New York: Scribner's, 1985.

Perluck, Herbert A. "'The Heart's Driving Complexity': An Unromantic Reading of 'The Bear'." Accent 20.1 (1960): 23-46.

Peters, John G. "Repudiation, Wilderness, Birthright: Reconciling Conflicting Views of Faulkner's Ike McCaslin." English Language Notes 33.3 (1996): 39-46.

Rivers, Jacob F., III. Cultural Values in the Southern Sporting Narrative. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002.

Roberts, Diane. "The South of the Mind." South to a New Place: Region, Literature and Culture. Ed. Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Montieth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2002. 363-73.

Segrest, Mab. My Mama's Dead Squirrel: Lesbian Essays on Southern Culture. Ithaca: Firebrand, 1985.

Vickery, Olga W. The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1959.

Webber, C. W. Romance of Natural History; or, Wild Scenes and Wild Hunters. Phildelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1852. W. S. Hoole

Special Collections Library, The University of Alabama. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Southern Honor: Ethics & Behavior in the Old South. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of The United States: 1492-Present. New York: Perennial Classics, 2001.

HARRY THOMAS

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

(1) Anything that I have written here which could be construed as being heretical to the practice of sportive hunting is not my father's doing. Harry Thomas, Sr., gave me his name and tried his best to raise me right, but sometimes--contrary to what Faulkner might say--the sins of the son are distinctly not the sins of the father. Despite my having grown up to be a non-hunter, my father has aided the writing of this essay by sending me back issues of hunting magazines and essays on hunting from a wide variety of authors. This paper would not have been possible without his assistance. I also thank Diane Roberts, who provided extensive (and invaluable) feedback on a number of drafts of this essay.

(2) In his Shakespeare and the Hunt, Edward Berry shows that sportive hunting has been the province and privilege of the ruling class at least as far back as the Elizabethan era: "The hunt itself, especially in its most ceremonial form, was a ritual celebration of the power of the monarch.... the hunt can be seen ... as a manifestation of various kinds and levels of patriarchal power" (36). That an activity once deemed the bailiwick of monarchy should have appealed to ruling class Southern whites of the Reconstruction era should come as no surprise. Such an endeavor fits neatly into what W.J. Cash sees as one of the great Southern delusions, the belief that "the great South of the first half of the nineteenth century--the South which fought the Civil War--was the home of a genuine and fully realized aristocracy, coextensive and identical with the ruling class, the planters; and sharply set apart from the common people" (4).

(3) See also William Barker Daniel: "The pursuits of the Sportsman, lure us from the smoke of cities to the healthful breezes of the forest, and the animating enjoyments of the field" (519); Vance Bourjaily: "I began to realize what I liked best about hunting was the companionship of a few good old trusted male buddies in the out-of-doors. Anything, any excuse, to get out into the hills, away from the crowds, to live, if only for a few days, beyond the wall" (x).

(4) John G. Peters provides a good overview of critical opinion about Ike and his repudiation. He notes that critics prior to 1960 saw Ike's actions generally in a kind light. See Walton Litz: Ike is "equivalent to Moses, a man ready to lead those who will listen and obey out of that Egyptian bondage which is the modern South's fragmentation into a Promised Land of order and love" (207); Ursula Brumm: Ike "expiate[s] the guilt of civilization by renunciation" (350).

(5) See Olga W. Vickery: "Isaac's withdrawal is in reality an attempt to evade both the guilt of his forefathers and his own responsibilities. Thus, while his daily life is a humble imitation of Christ's, it also denies the spirit of Christ who did not hesitate to share in the life of men" (133); Herbert A. Perluck: "Faulkner's meaning in 'The Bear' is that if man would live, he must be prepared for the dying too; if he would love, he must also grieve for the spilled life that loving and living require. Simply to repudiate ... is to remove oneself from life, and from love, which, like the hunt, necessarily involves us in blood" (42); Richard E. Fisher: Ike "is a tragic figure ... his development is interrupted.... he does not satisfactorily pass on to others the lessons that have made his own limited heroism possible" (20); Cleanth Brooks: "["Delta Autumn"] effectively undercuts any notion that Faulkner is asking the reader to accept Isaac's action as the ideal solution to the race problem or even to regard his motivation as obviously saintlike" (274); Gloria R. Dussinger: "By choosing to live apart rather than accept the contamination of social intercourse, Isaac has surrendered his moral force" (380); Laura P. Claridge: "Ike seeks this escape from the secular; he is one with the woods, which will not change but are timeless.... In spite of his protestations that he is freeing history of its corrupt McCaslin past, Ike instead evades the real exigencies and vagaries that the temporal always imposes on human beings" (247-48).

(6) In his introduction to the 1992 reprint of Hooper's Dog and Gun, Philip D. Beidler notes the almost total lack of women and blacks in the hunting manual and says of sportive hunting in general: "Here, without much self-critical questioning, is a class society, and it is one in which the putatively 'upper' classes (modeled on the landowning English gentry but including the literate male professionals--lawyers, doctors, journalists) mock and disdain their absent inferiors" (xvi). The episode with Uncle Ash I discuss shows that the hunters can barely contain their laughter even when one of their supposed "inferiors" is present.

(7) I have accepted--like most critics--that Isaac reads his family's plantation ledgers correctly. Evans challenges even this assumption and reminds readers to beware of Ike's romanticism:

The question of whether Ike makes the right decision or not has long provided material for critical debate. But what has attracted much less attention is whether or not Ike's interpretation of his grandfather's crime is right in the first place, whether it is actually a "discovery" of the truth or a projection of a reading that Ike desires, which he requires because it corresponds to a pattern of history that Ike wishes to be true, not least because it will accord him the central role of redeemer. (189)

(8) The way in which Ike imagines blacks to be childish--and his culture imagines them to be animalistic--can be seen during the argument Ike has with his cousin McCaslin in the fourth section of "The Bear." Ike defends blacks, saying that "they will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are" (281). Still, he does so in a paternalistic way that figures blacks as simple creatures devoid of their own identifies: "Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them" (281). And when Ike lists their virtues, McCaslin is quick to point out that the qualities Ike names are also qualities shared by animals:

'And their virtues--' and [Ike]

'Yes. Their own. Endurance--' and McCaslin

'So have mules:' and [Ike]

'--and pity and tolerance and forbearance and fidelity and love of children--' and McCaslin

'So have dogs:' (282)

(9) McCaslin recognizes this stance of Ike's when he calls Ike "'Chosen, I suppose'" (286).

(10) Anyone who thinks that Rivers's aristocratic code of Southern sportsmanship is a relic of the past need look no further than contemporary hunting magazines such as The Double Gun Journal, which covers its issues in faux-leather and prints its contents on pages designed to look gilt-edged. Volume 12, Issue I of the magazine was published in the Spring of 2001, and contains an article called "The English Taste," which is about the long and storied history of fine English shotgun makers. This article is nestled amongst full-color photographs of gold- and silver-encrusted shotguns and advertisements for similar guns marked at just under $40,000 a piece. The same issue also contains an article (written by Ileana Strauch) called "The Last Deer Drivers" which discusses the South Carolinian tradition of horse-mounted deer hunting while employing both backward-looking loss and language that links hunting with an authentic (and endangered) sense of masculinity. An excerpt:

What really lights up [ninety-five-year-old deer hunter Frank Ford's] eyes is the legacy of his father's 36 inch double barrel Parker shotgun. Only six or seven of these guns were specially made in 1908.

"I always wondered why they quit making those guns," ponders Mr. Ford.

Chuckling, Edward Lowndes responds, "What do you mean, man? Those guns are too damn big."

"That gun is a real man's gun," Frank Ford agrees.

(11) In Diane Roberts's estimation, "The South has always been disappearing.... The South as its people [know] it [is] perpetually on the brink of disintegration, about to reach the Promised Land or else about to slide into apocalyptic chaos" (363). Similarly, it seems that hunters have long lamented the increasing scarcity of the animals they hunt. Ortega admits that most hunters believe that "If in our childhood there was more game than today, going backward in time we should find greater and greater abundance and we should presently arrive at times in which it must have been superabundant" (57). Ortega's own faith in this idea was shaken after he came across a fifteenth-century account of boar hunting which implies that boars, even then, "when no weapon other than the javelin or the lance was used in big game hunting" were scarce (59). This document started Ortega down a line of thinking that led him to

 a monumental but inevitable paradox: the fact that man hunts
 presupposes that there is and always has been a scarcity of game.
 If game were superabundant there would not exist that peculiar
 animal behavior which we distinguish from all others with the
 precise name "hunting." Since air is usually abundant, there is no
 technical ability involving in breathing, and breathing is not
 hunting air. (67)

(12) Sam Fathers warns against thinking that the natural world is either fair or kind when he tells Ike that Old Ben "dont care no more for bears than he does for dogs or men neither" (190).