Old Ben is finally brought to "bay" - driven to a position from which he cannot retreat - "against a down tree top" (196). Since this is in the part of the woods where "no axe [had] left a scar" (192), the tree was presumably brought down by wind or age. Its "top" is a tangle of branches through which the bear cannot travel.
In "Lion" Old Ben is finally brought to "bay" - driven to a position from which he cannot retreat - "against a down tree top" (196). Since this is in the part of the woods where "no axe [had] left a scar" (192), the tree was presumably brought down by wind or age. Its "top" is a tangle of branches through which the bear cannot travel.
The "Gum Tree" where Quentin finds Boon is "a single big gum just outside the woods, in an old clearing" (198). As a place to shoot squirrels it is celebrated enough to be referred to (by both Ad and Quentin) with that capital G and capital T (198,199).
The "holly knoll" is an elevated piece of land crowned by "four pale trunks" of holly trees that mark the corners of the spot where the dog Lion was buried under a "wooden cross with Old Ben's dried mutilated paw nailed to it" (199). Its slight elevation was not enough to keep "the spring flood water" from the river from washing away all traces of the grave (199). (A slightly different but much more profoundly situated version of this grave site occurs in the last section of "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses).
Founded in 1819, Memphis, Tennessee, was the closest big city to Yoknapatawpha County. It plays a role in many of Faulkner's novels and stories, especially as the place where people from Jefferson went to misbehave: to buy liquor, for example, as Boon and Quentin do in this story. In the story it appears as "the tall buildings and the hard pavements and the street cars" that make Quentin feel conspicuous in his hunting clothes (188), and the railroad station with its restaurant in which Boon appears as a kind of wild animal.
In "Lion" Quentin and Boon travel by train directly from Hoke's to Memphis. When characters in other fictions travel by train from Jefferson to Memphis, they have to change trains north of Yoknapatawpha. Faulkner drew only one railroad on both his maps of the county, so presumably he forgot or simply ignores that fact in this story - as he does again when he incorporates "Lion" into Go Down, Moses, where it's Ike McCaslin who rides with Boon directly to Memphis from Hoke's.
The "woods" in this story are the old-growth forest on both sides of the Tallahatchie river in the northwestern corner of Yoknapatawpha County (187). They are owned by Major de Spain, who leads an annual party of hunters to his camp deep inside them. Though Jefferson is "just twenty miles away," this primeval world is described as the antithesis to the world of "houses" and "stores" in town - unchanged, Quentin thinks, since "the first Indian crept into it" long ago (192).
The hunters have a regular spot - Quentin calls it "our crossing" (198) - where by flagging it down or special request they can get on or off the logging train that runs through the big woods.
"Three miles down" (i.e. downstream) from the spot where Old Ben swims across the river is "a log drift" on which some of the hunters cross over on foot to try to join the chase after Old Ben (194). It isn't described, but perhaps a "log drift" is a kind of natural bridge across the river. The most likely such 'bridge' would be a tree that fell on one bank that was tall enough to reach the other side, but in that case why would Faulkner use the word 'drift'?
