This marks the spot were the hunt for Old Ben crosses the river. Ad and Boon swim across it in pursuit, but because the only boat the hunters have is "just a [two-person] duck boat" (194), most of the other men turn back to camp.
Beside the camp is a field where the hunters' horses and mules are pastured. It is here that Boon "catches" and "saddles" a mule to carry him to the doctor's (195).
Although the narrator never identifies himself, he is once referred to as "Quentin" by another character (186). Almost certainly Faulkner meant Quentin Compson, whom readers of The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom! know well, and whom Faulkner used to narrate at least two other short stories. In "Lion," Quentin looks back from an unspecified later time to when he was a sixteen-year-old novice hunter in Major de Spain's camp.
Quentin calls the tracks on which the "log train" travels through the woods "the dummy line" (187), by which he presumably distinguishes it from the kind of permanent main railroad line that connects cities and towns. Log trains travel back and forth along short spur lines, carrying harvested trees to the sawmill. Quentin and Boon have to "flag" the train down to get it to stop for them, and they ride with the conductor and brakeman in the caboose (187).
"Hoke's" is first described as "the little town on the edge of Major de Spain's preserve" (185), though "town" seems like an overstatement when Quentin later says "Hoke's was just a sawmill and a few stores" (188). Its population is probably mostly male, and its economy based entirely on logging. It is where the logging train that runs through the woods intersects the railroad that takes Quentin and Boon to Memphis.
In "Lion" 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.
Beside the hunting camp in "Lion" is a field where the hunters' horses and mules are pastured. It is here that Boon "catches" and "saddles" a mule to carry him to the doctor's (195).
In "Lion" the doctor whom Boon fetches to sew Lion up lives with his wife at "Hoke's" (196). (In Go Down, Moses the "sawmill doctor" Boon brings to the camp is given a name, "Doctor Crawford," but his house is not mentioned, 232, 230.)
In this story Major de Spain's hunting camp is about "twenty miles" from Jefferson (192), deep enough into the old growth woods to bring the men who live there during hunting season close to the "bear and deer" they and their dogs love to hunt (184). It includes a kitchen (where Ad sleeps), a "shed room" (where Boon sleeps, 187), and the "porch" where Lion spends the last hours of his life (197).
