The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

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.

When adapting the first two manuscript sections of "The Bear" for this much shortened magazine version, Faulkner altered two aspects of the young protagonist. In the manuscript sections that he sent to Random House in September 1941, Ike McCaslin is a sixteen-year-old adolescent, who is taught to hunt by one of his father's former slaves, Sam Fathers. In the magazine version, Faulkner provided no name for his young protagonist and changed his age to ten.

The officer in command of the cavalry troop Rosa Millard encounters at the ford across the river is not named, but is clearly identified as "a heavy-built man with a red face" (54). We get a good idea why he looks choleric when he reads the Rosa's requisition order and swears.

He stands outside the tent to which Rosa Millard, Bayard and Ringo are taken after they cross the river.