Spilmer may or may not still be alive, but the property above the ravine ditch where Mannie Hait hides and shoots a mule bears his name in both "Mule in the Yard" and The Town.
Mannie Hait first appears in "Mule in the Yard," and then returns in her role as widow and adversary of mules and I.O. Snopes when Faulkner re-tells the story in The Town. In both texts she staunchly defends her house against both adversaries, but is defeated by her own carelessness. In the end, however, despite the loss of her house, she manages to get even with one mule and one Snopes.
The "defunct husband" of Mrs. Hait - called simply Hait in "Mule in the Yard" (252) and Lonzo Hait in The Town - was helping I.O. Snopes cheat the insurance company when he (along with a string of I.O.'s mules) was killed in a train accident on a blind curve next to his house in Jefferson. According to what his widow says to I.O. in both texts, "you paid him fifty dollars a trip each time he got mules in front of the train in time" (262, 262).
In "A Bear Hunt" these "town officers" must be local law enforcement officials who, less than a week after Luke Provine appears in town carrying a black sample case, discover that what he is selling is bootleg whisky, a serious crime in Yoknapatawpha, which like the rest of Mississippi prohibited the sale of alcohol - not only during, but also before and after Prohibition (64). (Mississippi did not legalize liquor until the 1960s.) The story suggests they arrest Provine for his crime, but allow Major de Spain to "extricate" him from the charge (64).
The narrator of "A Bear Hunt" identifies a group of men who, "since the last year years, cannot find work" (64). The chronological reference probably points to the Great Depression of the 1930s, an era defined by mass unemployment and what the story calls "men among us now whose families are in want" (64).
These black men in "A Bear Hunt" were at a Negro church picnic some twenty years ago when they were set upon by the pistol-wielding Provine gang, then taken "one by one" and tormented and demeaned by having the celluloid shirt collars they wear burned, "leaving each victim’s neck ringed with an abrupt and faint and painless ring of carbon" (65). The ring may have been "painless," but the psychological scar it left is not - as beccomes clear when it is revealed at the very end of the story that one of men who was forced to wear it is Ash.
An unspecified number of black men are present in the hunting camp in "A Bear Hunt." Their role in the annual hunt is to cook and do other odd jobs around the camp. As blacks and as servants, they tend to be ignored or not noticed by the white hunters except when they are sought for some reason, as happens when Major de Spain calls for Old Man Ash to fetch him a drink when Ash has gone to the Indian mound. One of these other black servants appears with the "demijohn and fixings" and reports that Ash has gone "up to'ds de mound" (74).
One of the boys in town who, "on a dare," joins the unnamed narrator of "A Bear Hunt" when he was fifteen to spend a night on the Indian mound (66). During and afterwards, they do not speak about their experience, apparently awed by it; the narrator says even though they were children, "yet we were descendants of people who read books and who were - or should have been - beyond superstition and impervious to mindless fear" (66).
Ratliff calls the first people he encounters upon returning to Jefferson after his misadventure at the hunting camp in "A Bear Hunt" the "first fellow" and "a fellow" (66). They ask about his facial injuries - one in standard English, one in a country vernacular - and their questions provide Ratliff with a way to begin his story. They don't seem to be the "you" (67), however, to whom he "is telling" the story itself (63).
This group of "ladies," most of whom are likely residents of Jefferson, are described by the narrator of "A Bear Hunt" as "scurrying and screaming" when, some twenty years earlier, the Provine gang would occasionally "terrorize" them by galloping horses in their midst as they were going to or from church on Sunday mornings (64).
