The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The "crossings" that intersect the ridge path are faint trails made by deer moving through the woods. They are good places for hunters to wait for game. We also use this location as the site where the dogs first turn Old Ben on the final day of the hunt.

The "ridge" in the big woods appears in both "The Old People" and "The Bear." In the first story, it is described as invisible from within the woods. The narrator discerns that they have reached the edge of the ridge when he notices that "the earth had risen slightly because the underbrush had thinned a little, the ground sloping invisibly away toward a dense wall of cane" (171). The text also comments that where the ridge begins there is "a tremendous pin oak" (208). The path along the ridge is intersected at intervals by deer crossings.

Before they reach the big woods, the hunters travel past the "skeletoned cotton- and corn-fields . . . hard, gaunt, and motionless beneath the gray rain" and houses and barns (168). The fields are "skeletoned" at this time of year because they've been harvested. The houses and barns mark the the last point "where the hand of man had clawed for an instant, holding, the wall of the wilderness" that lies just beyond them (168). Many of these farmers show up to join the hunt for Old Ben, who has raided their livestock for years.

The trail along which the hunters take the wagon and horses bends away from the hunting camp through the woods. It is flanked at one point by a paw-paw thicket.

This is a small road that connects the hunting camp with the main road, along which the hunters take the horses and wagons filled with "the camp equipment and the trophies, the meat, the heads, the antlers, the good ones" (168).

The road into the big woods presumably branches off the northwest road, but the story isn't explicit about that. What it does describe very vividly is the place at which this road enters the woods, when the hunters cross a "line as sharp as the demarcation of a doored wall" (168). On one side of this door, the "skeleton cotton- and corn-fields," "houses, barns, fences" of Yoknapatawpha - on the other, the "wilderness," "tremendous and still and seemingly impenetrable" (206).

Jobaker's "foul little shack" (163) is situated at the forks of a creek five miles from the McCaslin plantation and about the same distance from any other habitation. It is destroyed by fire.

This is a hilltop with impressive view of the night sky from which Sam Fathers and a young Isaac McCaslin release the dogs to hunt foxes.

Like the cabin that Sam Fathers lives in before he moves out to the big woods, the blacksmith shop where he works is one of the locations that Faulkner moves around to suit his changing imaginative project. Initially, in "A Justice," it's on the Compson farm, but for the hunting stories he wrote Faulkner first attenuates Sam's connection to the white world (the family he works for in "The Old People" is not named), then in Go Down, Moses shifts that connection to the McCaslins, and this blacksmith shop comes with him each time.