The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Walter Ewell is a sharp-shooting hunter, a regular member of Major de Spain's hunting parties. It is with one of Ewell's rifles that the boy hunts in "The Bear" (290-1). The hunters themselves belong to different age groups, with Faulkner making clear during the course of the story that General Compson is the oldest, followed by De Spain, and then by Ewell and the boy's father, who belong to the same generation (287).

Faulkner provides almost no description of Boon Hoggenbeck in this version of "The Bear." From the other texts in which he appears readers know that Boon has a Chickasaw grandmother. In "The Bear," however, the narrative emphasizes his status as a white man.

Tennie's Jim appears to be a slightly altered version of Jimbo from "The Old People." In "The Bear," he is a hunter who "knew the woods and what ran them." Faulkner is clear, however, to distinguish him racially from the white hunters (293). He thus belongs to the group of attendants who aid the white hunters. He assists the camp's cook, old Uncle Ash, with his role limited to "pour[ing] whisky from the demijohn into the tin dipper" of the "Brunswick stew" (287), and later to tending the "fire and to pass[ing] the bottle from one glass to another" (293).

Old Uncle Ash sometimes hunts with the group, but considers "himself first a cook" (282), tending to the fire and preparing breakfast, stews and other meals for the hunters each November at Major de Spain's hunting camp as well as on special occasions such as the June celebration of De Spain and General Compson’s birthdays (287).

The "son of a Negro slave and an Indian king" (294), Sam Fathers is a major figure in Faulkner's late hunting stories. The narrator of "The Bear" describes him as "the old man, the Indian," whose clothing - "the battered faded overalls and the frayed five-cent straw hat" - was both "the badge of his enslavement" as a "Negro" on a plantation and now, in the woods, "the regalia of his freedom" (288). The boy whom he teaches to hunt thinks of him as "his mentor" (290).

The General Compson who appears in this story is "Jason Lycurgus Compson," and appears in a dozen other Yoknapatawpha fictions. In this shortened magazine version of "The Bear," we are told that he was "old enough to be a brigade commander in 1865" (286) and he retains this characterizing epithet ("old General Compson," 280, 284, 286, 287, etc.) throughout. In the story, set at least seventeen years after the end of the Civil War, he is a close friend and hunting companion of Major de Spain.

Beginning with "Wash" (1934), a least one "Major de Spain" appears in over a dozen Yoknapatawpha fictions - although only one of the two characters with that military title was a real Confederate major. The other, his son, inherited the title. Both father and son are powerful in Yoknapatawpha business and politics, wealthy planters with large land holdings, including the hunting camp where this story is set. In some of the texts - including this one - it is impossible to say for sure if the "Major de Spain" who appears is the father or the son.

In a surviving seventeen-page typescript for "The Old People," the father of the boy hunter is referred to as "Mr Compson," presumably the father of Benjy, Caddy, Quentin and Jason. By July 1941, when Faulkner began work on "The Bear" section of Go Down, Moses, the boy is Isaac (Ike) McCaslin, and the role of his father is played instead by his cousin, Carothers Edmonds. In this magazine version, which was adapted from that manuscript, the character has no name at all, although it is clear that he belongs to Yoknapatawpha's upper-class and owns a farm outside of Jefferson.