donthomas wrote: If you want great American writing about hunting, go straight to Faulkner’s “The Bear.”
And for a whole lot more, as you are undoubtedly aware. Having read everything by Faulkner a few times, I’m unsure at this point what to advise someone who might never have read any of it and now contemplates “The Bear”. Perhaps this –
Leave “it” all behind, taking only a compass and a stick for the snakes as Isaac did, and just go into the woods with the bear, heeding Sam’s advice:
“You ain’t looked right yet,” Sam said.
He stopped. For a moment he didn’t answer. Then he said peacefully, in a peaceful rushing burst as when a boy’s miniature dam in a little brook gives way, “All right. But how? I went to the bayou. I even found that log again. I—“
“I reckon that was all right. Likely he’s been watching you. You never saw his foot?”
“I,” the boy said—“I didn’t—I never thought—“
“It’s the gun,” Sam said. He stood beside the fence motionless—the old man, the Indian, in the battered faded overalls and the five-cent straw hat which in the Negro’s race had been the badge of his enslavement and was now the regalia of his freedom. The camp—the clearing, the house, the barn and its tiny lot with which Major de Spain in his turn had scratched punily and evanescently at the wilderness—faded in the dusk, back into the immemorial darkness of the woods. The gun, the boy thought. The gun.
“Be scared,” Sam said. “You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid. Ain’t nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.”
The gun, the boy thought.
“You will have to choose,” Sam said.
