Hunting Camp in "Delta Autumn"|Go Down, Moses in Go Down, Moses (Location)

The place where Ike's annual hunting party made camp in the Delta had to move regularly, as the clearing of the land for agriculture kept spreading and the wilderness "retreating southward" (326). This location represents the likely place, two hundred miles from Jefferson, where they are camped during this story. What the text refers to as "the ultimate funneling tip" where the wilderness still exists (326) is probably the point at which the Yazoo River, "the River of the Dead of the Chocktaws" (324), joins the Mississippi. (It is probably the Yazoo that Ike helps swim the horses across.) In this area they are beyond the last cotton fields and farms, surrounded by "the tangle of brier and cane impenetrable even to sight twenty feet away" and "the tall tremendous soaring of oak and gum and ash and hickory which had rung to no axe save the hunter's" (326).