Unnamed First Aboriginal

In three differents versions of the story of Lion, Old Ben and the hunt, Faulkner evokes a prehistoric context for the ritual. In "Lion" it is Quentin Compson who, waiting on his assigned stand in the bayou, realizes that the scene before him is no different in appearance from what it was when, long ago, the first human explorer of the wilderness in Yoknpatawpha "crept into it and looked around, arrow poised and ready" (192). In the later texts "The Bear" and in Go Down, Moses, Faulkner revises this a bit, partly to adapt it to the new protagonists - Ike McCaslin and Sam Fathers. The "first Indian" of "Lion" (192) becomes the "the first ancestor of Sam Fathers' Chickasaw predecessors" (285, 192). And his weapon might have been a "club or stone ax or bone arrow," which pushes this aboriginal moment still further back into the past (285, 192). (See also Unnamed Aboriginal in the index.)