When Provine leaves camp to go to the mound, he travels down "the road that went down the bottom" (72). Given the fact that the woods in "A Bear Hunt" are called a "jungle of cane and gum and pin oak" (65), this "road" is probably more like a path.
The Chickasaw settlement and store in "A Bear Hunt" is a good example of how the needs of Faulkner's imagination often take precedence over historical fact. Yoknapatawpha is located in the area that was once occupied by the Chickasaw Indians. According to the story's narrator, a "remnant" of this "once powerful" tribe still lives in the county in the 20th century, "under Government protection," in "their own settlement," a community that includes their own "store" as well (65).
In "A Bear Hunt" the African-American church that is the scene of the picnic where Ash first tangled with Provine is "a few miles from town" (64) - though the text doesn't tell us in which direction.
The Negro church that Joe Christmas invades in Light in August is twenty miles away from Jefferson. It contains the traditional pews and pulpit, but when Christmas enters it during the night-time service it is also described as having a "thick, cavelike gloom," which is increased by "two oil lamps" (322). The "churchyard" consists of "a pallid crescent of trampled and beaten earth, shaped and enclosed by undergrowth and trees," and nearby is at least one cabin, to which Roz is carried after Christmas knocks him out (325).
"Five miles . . . down the river from Major de Spain's camp," in a "wilder part of the river's jungle," is the topographical feature in "A Bear Hunt" that Ratliff calls "an Indian mound" - "the only elevation of any kind" in the "flat jungle of river bottom" (65). Many real earthen mounds, built at different times over almost two thousand years by the aboriginal peoples who once occupied Mississippi, still exist.
In "A Bear Hunt," when Ratliff summons Ash, one of the Negro servants who accompany the party of white hunters, he goes "to the door" of the Major de Spain's hunting camp and yells "towards the kitchen" (74). Even in the wilderness, in other words, the living arrangements follow the pattern of the plantations and town residences where Yoknapatawpha's upper-class white families live.
A deer-hunting 'stand' can be a structure, a platform attached to a tree that allows the hunter to wait a dozen or so feet above the ground for his prey to walk past - or the term 'stand' can simply mean a specific place on the ground, usually against a tree, where the hunter waits. In the Yoknapatawpha fictions it usually is the second kind of 'stand' that is meant. In either case, it's a safety precaution: when a group is hunting together, as is also the usual case in Faulkner's fictions, by staying at their 'stands' the hunters know where the other hunters are.
A deer-hunting 'stand' can be a structure, a platform attached to a tree that allows the hunter to wait a dozen or so feet above the ground for his prey to walk past - or the term 'stand' can simply mean a specific place on the ground, usually against a tree, where the hunter waits. In the Yoknapatawpha fictions it usually is the second kind of 'stand' that is meant. In either case, it's a safety precaution: when a group of hunters go into the woods at the same time, as is also the usual case in Faulkner's fictions, each man stays at his 'stand' and knows where the other hunters are.
Tom Tom is married to his fourth wife, who is "new" and "young" and willing to entertain Tomey's Turl while her husband is at work in the power plant (22). After Tom Tom ends the affair, she joins the rivals in hiding the stolen brass.
Tom Tom Bird is "a big bull of a man weighing two hundred pounds and sixty years old but looking about forty and married about two years ago to his fourth wife: a young woman whom he kept with the strict jealous seclusion of a Turk in a cabin about two miles down the railroad track from the plant" (16). For twenty years he has worked at the power plant in Jefferson as the day fireman - that is, the kind of fireman who shovels coal to keep the plant's fire going.
