Unnamed Family's Plantation in "The Bear" (Location)

The family plantation is situated four miles from Jefferson. In "The Old People," it is called a "farm," but in this story Faulkner explicitly calls it a "plantation," although in the earlier story we learn much more about its organization. There are cabins for black tenant farmers on the land, as well as the blacksmith shop where Sam Father works. A more substantive difference between the two stories involves the setting that is referred to in both of them as the boy's father's "office." In "The Bear," "the room which [the boy's] father called the office, from which all the plantation business was transacted," has apparently moved from Jefferson to the plantation, and is described in much more detail: it is decorated with three trophies, "the pelt of the bear which the boy had killed . . . and the larger one which his father had killed before he was born" and "the mounted head of the boy’s first buck" above the bookcase (293). It is also a conversation hub and meeting place for the hunters during the off-season; the boy has spent "his life" listening to the "best of all talking" for "Major de Spain would be there and sometimes old General Compson, and Walter Ewell and Boon Hoggenbeck and Sam Fathers and Tennie’s Jim, too, because they, too, were hunters, knew the woods and what ran them."