Faulkner creates a prehistoric context for the ritual of hunting Old Ben by having Ike, on what he thinks may be the day they kill the bear, think about "the first ancestor of Sam Fathers' Chickasaw predecessors," the first human being who saw the wilderness he is standing in (192). That the man hunts with a "club or stone ax or bone arrow" seems to locate that moment hundreds if not thousands of years in the past.
