Tree Stand in "The Old People" (Location)

The hunting stand where the narrator waits with Sam Fathers for a shot at his first deer is in the middle of what Faulkner elsewhere calls "the Big Woods," a mixture of "tremendous gums and cypresses and oaks where no axe had ever sounded" (206). In deer hunting a "stand" can mean an elevated platform attached to a tree. In this case, however, "stand" simply means the place in the woods allotted to Ike by the hunting party, "one of the poorer stands . . . since he was only" a boy (205), probably at one end of a widely-spaced line of hunters.