The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Unlike the other towns mentioned alongside it - Tillatoba, Homochitto and Yazoo (325) - the town of "Aluschaskuna" was invented by Faulkner, though he probably was thinking of a real Delta town like Arcona when he did so - i.e. a small town with a majority black population, an economy dependent on the cotton crop, and an existence dependent on the rise and fall of the Mississippi River. It is "the last little Indian-named town" (325) on the road to the hunting camp.

The place where Ike's annual hunting party made camp in the Delta had to move regularly, as the clearing of the land for agriculture kept spreading and the wilderness "retreating southward" (326). This location represents the likely place, two hundred miles from Jefferson, where they are camped during this story. What the text refers to as "the ultimate funneling tip" where the wilderness still exists (326) is probably the point at which the Yazoo River, "the River of the Dead of the Chocktaws" (324), joins the Mississippi.

The 200-mile trip that the hunters take from Yoknapatawpha to their camp in the Delta gives Faulkner an opportunity to describe the interior of Mississippi in both spatial and temporal terms. Geographically, the they travel from the "cradling hills" in the east (324) to the "rich unbroken alluvial flatness" of the vast flood plain along the Mississippi River (319).