The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The one detail that this story provides about McCaslin's unnamed father differ substantially from his biography elsewhere in Faulkner's fiction. Here this "father" is remembered as having fought in the Civil War as a cavalryman under Major de Spain (273) - or as his son puts it, "my pappy" was one of the men who "tried once to tear [the U.S.] in two with a war" (269).

Mentioned by Boyd as one of ominous signs on the horizon of contemporary events, William Dudley Pelley was a journalist, a novelist, a screenwriter and publisher before making a name for himself a fascist and a religious leader. In 1936 Pelley ran for president as the candidate for the Christian Party, preaching antisemitism and socialism as staples for a new Christian Commonwealth. He supported Hitler's ideology regarding Jews.

The character of this unnamed woman with whom Don Boyd has had an affair and a child comes into focus slowly. At the start of the story she is referred to elliptically as the "doe" whom Boyd hunted the year before (268). When she appears before Ike in person at the end of the story, she brings with her "something intangible" (277). She is wearing a man's hat and rain coat, and has "a face young" with "dark eyes" (268). She tells Ike she is a teacher.

Will Legate is a member of the Yoknapatawpha hunting party that travels to the Delta in 1940, a son of one of Ike's "old companions, whom he had taught" the discipline of hunting (268). Legate is protective of Ike as "a man your age," but shows only a little concern when Boyd violates that code by killing a doe, and no concern at all for the "pretty light-colored" two-legged "doe" with whom Don Boyd has an affair with (268-69).

One of the leaders of the hunting party, Don has "the youngest face of them all, darkly aquiline, handsome and ruthless and saturnine" (268). The story reveals his ruthlessness in several ways, beginning with his driving and ending with his abandonment of the woman he had an affair with and the child they conceived together. He seems to think money can settle his moral and emotional debts. A veteran of the first World War, he is cynical about America and "women and children" (270).

The group of young men who travel with Ike McCaslin to the Delta to hunt is larger than the few men mentioned by name or description. The group travels in four vehicles, one of which is described as the "other car" (272) The other vehicles are the two trucks that carry the equipment (272). Many of these modern day hunters are the sons and grandsons of the men with whom Ike hunted in Yoknapatawpha's Big Bottom. As a group they respect "Uncle Ike" as their mentor, but the story implies that they are not an improvement over their ancestors.