Hunting Camp in the Delta (Location Key)

In The Reivers, Faulkner's last novel, Lucius Priest tells his grandson that "by 1940," hunters from Yoknapatawpha had to "drive two hundred miles over paved highways to find enough wilderness to pitch tents in" (19). The place they go to, according to other texts, is the Mississippi Delta, and even in the Delta, over the years they had to keep moving the camp, as more and more land was cleared for agriculture and the wilderness "retreated southward" (272, 326). "Delta Autumn" is set at one of these camps. What the story refers to as "the ultimate funneling tip" where the wilderness still exists (272, 326) is probably the point at which the Yazoo River, "the River of the Dead of the Chocktaws" (270, 324), joins the Mississippi. (It is probably the Yazoo that Ike McCaslin helps swim the horses across.) In this area they are beyond the last cotton fields and farms, surrounded by "the tangle of brier and cane impenetrable even to sight twenty feet away" and "the tall tremendous soaring of oak and gum and ash and hickory that had rang to no axe save the hunter's" (272, 326). (The hunting story "Race at Morning," one of Faulkner's last short stories, also takes place in the Delta, and may be on the same patch of imaginative land as this camp, but for this text we created 15 separate Locations; see Delta Hunting Ground in this index.)