The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The brakeman on the log-train that runs to and from Hoke’s sawmill and commissary knows the news of the area and speaks with Boon about Lion and Old Ben.

For a reason that is not explained, Boon shot five times at this "negro on the street in Jefferson" (218). Although the man was unhit, he remains the exception to Ike’s assessment of Boon as one who is unlikely to respond violently to insult. (When this episode is described again in The Reivers, the man is named Ludus.)

Semmes is a distiller in Memphis to whom Boon and Ike are sent by Major de Spain for whisky during the annual hunting trip.

Among the people who come out to the hunting camp to watch the final hunt for the bear are these several men from beyond Yoknapatawpha, "townsmen, from other county seats like Jefferson" (212). They come because they have heard of Lion and Old Ben, but are not hunters: "Some of them didn’t even have guns and the hunting-clothes and boots they wore had been on a store shelf yesterday" (212).

Men who live in the swamp, “gaunt, malaria-ridden men” (210), appear in various combinations throughout the year to look at Lion. Many of them feel invested in Major de Spain’s attempts to hunt Old Ben, since the bear had ruined their crops or cattle. The swampers are described as those “who ran trap-lines for coons or perhaps farmed little patches of cotton and corn along the edge of the bottom, in clothes but little better than Sam Fathers’ and nowhere near as good as Tennie’s Jim’s, with worn shotguns and rifles” (210). The men come primarily to watch the hunt, not to shoot.

When the narrative refers to "the little puny humans [who] swarmed and hacked" at the wilderness "in a fury of abhorrence and fear" (183), it is describing the people who clear the woods for farms and cut them down for timber, the two main staples of the local economy. Some of these "men with plows and axes" appear directly in the story, as the men from the neighboring farms and from a nearby logging camp who join the final hunt for Old Ben; each of these two groups has their own entry as characters.

These "hunters" are created by the narrator at the start of "The Bear," when he defines "hunters" as a exalted category of its own, a quasi-spiritual group, men who are "not white nor black nor red but men, hunters" (181). Distinguished also from "women," "boys," and "children," hunters tell stories about hunting while drinking liquor "in salute to" their prey (181-82). Even the camp cooks, however, are "hunters first and cooks afterward" (185), meaning they are better at the former.

Sutpen is an early settler in Yoknapatawpha who bought one hundred square miles of wilderness from Ikkemotubbe, land that included the hunting camp on the Tallahatchie River that Sutpen in turn sold to Major de Spain. His story is at the narrative center of Absalom, Absalom! (1936). In this novel he is only mentioned twice, both times as the original owner of the land that Major de Spain bought as a hunting ground (181, 241).

He is the elderly black cook at Major de Spain’s hunting camp who also works for him in his office in Jefferson. In the last section of "The Bear" chapter, he provides a kind of minstrel comedy when he tries hunting himself with Boon's gun and four shells he's collected over the years, including one that "Genl Cawmpson guv me" eight years earlier (308).

Jobaker was a hermit and “full-blood Chickasaw” (163) who hunted and fished and desired no friendship except that of Sam Fathers. His death prompted Sam to leave his place near the McCaslin plantation and live year-round at Major de Spain’s hunting camp.