Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (32 page)

Two days after that Sam walked to town and came to father’s office. I was there when he walked in without knocking and stood there—the Indian, with the Indian face for all the nigger clothes.

“I want to go,” he said. “I want to go to the big bottom to live.”

“To live?” father said.

“You can fix it with Major de Spain,” Sam said. “I could live in the camp and take care of it for you all. Or I could build me a little house.” For a little while they both looked at each other, he and father. Then father said:

“All right. I’ll fix it.” And Sam went out, and that was all.

I was nine then; it seemed perfectly natural to me that nobody, not even father, would argue with Sam any more than I would. But I could not understand it.

“If Joe Baker’s dead like they say,” I said, “and Sam hasn’t got anybody any more at all kin to him, why does he want to go into the big bottom, where he won’t ever see anybody except us for a few days in the fall while we are hunting?”

Father looked at me. It was not a curious look, it was just thoughtful. I didn’t notice it then. I did not remember it until later. Then he quit looking at me.

“Maybe that’s what he wants,” he said.

So Sam moved. He owned so little that he could carry it. He walked. He would neither let father send him in the wagon nor would he take one of the mules. He was just gone one morning, the cabin vacant in which he had lived for years yet in which there never had been very much, the shop standing idle now in which there never had been very much to do. Each November we would go into the big bottom, to the camp—Major de Spain and father and Walter Ewell and Boon and Uncle Ike McCaslin and two or three others, with Jimbo and Uncle Ash to cook, and the dogs. Sam would be there; if he was glad to see us he did not show it. If he regretted to see us depart again he did not show that. Each morning he would go out to my stand with me before the dogs were cast. It would be one of the poorer stands of course, since I was only nine and ten and eleven and I had never even seen a deer running yet.
But we would stand there. Sam a little behind me and without a gun himself, as he had stood when I shot the running rabbit when I was eight years old; we would stand there in the November dawns and after a while we would hear the dogs. Sometimes they would sweep up and past, close, belling and invisible; once we heard the five heavy reports of Boon’s old pump gun with which he had never killed anything larger than a rabbit or a squirrel, and that sitting, and twice we heard from our stand the flat unreverberant clap of Walter Ewell’s rifle which never missed, so that you did not even wait to hear his horn.

“I’ll never get a shot,” I said. “I’ll never kill one.”

“Yes you will,” Sam said. “You wait. You’ll be a hunter. You’ll be a man.”

And we would leave him there. He would go out to the road where the surrey would be waiting in order to take the horses and mules back; for now that he lived at the camp all the time, father and Major de Spain left the horses and the dogs there. They would go on ahead on the horses and Uncle Ash and Jimbo and I would follow in the wagon with Sam, with the guns and the bedding and the meat and the heads, the antlers, the good ones, the wagon winding on among the tremendous gums and cypresses and oaks where no axe had ever sounded, between the impenetrable brakes of cane and brier—the two changing yet constant walls just beyond which the wilderness seemed to lean, stooping a little, watching us and listening; not quite inimical because we were too small, our sojourn too brief and too harmless to excite to that, just brooding, secret, almost inattentive. Then we would emerge, we would be out of it, the line as sharp as the demarcation of a doored wall. Suddenly skeletoned cotton- and corn-fields would flow away on either hand, gaunt and motionless beneath the gray rain; there would be a house, barns, where the hand of man had clawed for an instant, holding, the wall of the wilderness behind us now, tremendous and still and seemingly impenetrable in the gray and fading light. The surrey would be waiting, father and Major de Spain and Uncle Ike dismounted beside it. Then Sam would get down from the wagon and mount one of the horses and, with the others at lead behind him, he would turn back. I would watch him for a while against that tall and secret wall, growing smaller and smaller against it. He would not look back. Then he would enter it, returning to what I
believed, and thought that father believed, was his loneliness and solitude.

   So the instant came; I pulled trigger and ceased to be a child forever and became a hunter and a man. It was the last day. We broke camp that afternoon and went out, father and Major de Spain and Uncle Ike and Boon on the horses and mules, Walter Ewell and old Ash and Jimbo and I in the wagon with Sam and the duffel and my hide and antlers. There could have been other trophies in the wagon too but I should not have known it, just as for all practical purposes Sam Fathers and I were still alone together as we had been that morning, the wagon winding and jolting on between those shifting yet constant walls from beyond which the wilderness watched us passing, less than inimical now and never inimical again since my buck still and forever leaped, the shaking gun-barrels coming constantly and forever steady at last, crashing, and still out of his moment of mortality the buck sprang, forever immortal, that moment of the buck, the shot, Sam Fathers and myself and the blood with which he had marked me forever, one with the wilderness which had now accepted me because Sam had said that I had done all right; the wagon winding on, when suddenly Sam checked it and we all heard that unforgettable and unmistakable sound of a deer breaking cover.

Then Boon shouted from beyond the bend of the trail and while we all sat motionless in the halted wagon, Walter and I already reaching for our guns, Boon came galloping back, flogging his mule with his hat, his face wild and amazed as he shouted down at us. Then father and the others came round the bend.

“Get the dogs!” Boon cried. “Get the dogs! If he had a nub on his head, he had fourteen points! Laying right there in that pawpaw thicket! If I’d a knowed he was there, I could a cut his throat with my pocket knife!”

“Maybe that’s why he run,” Walter said. “He saw you never had your gun.” He was already out of the wagon, with his rifle. Then I was out too with my gun, and father and Major de Spain and Uncle Ike had come up and Boon got off his mule somehow and was scrabbling among the duffel for his gun, still shouting, “Get the dogs! Get the dogs!” And it seemed to me too that it would take them forever to decide what to do—the old men in whom the blood
ran cold and slow, in whom during the intervening years between us the blood had become a different and colder substance from that which ran in me and even in Boon and Walter.

“What about it, Sam?” father said. “Could the dogs bring him back?”

“We won’t need the dogs,” Sam said. “If he don’t hear dogs behind him he will circle back in here about sundown to bed.”

“All right,” Major de Spain said. “You boys take the horses. We’ll go on out to the road in the wagon and wait there.” So he and father and Uncle Ike got into the wagon, and Boon and Walter and Sam and I took the horses and turned back and out of the trail. We rode for about an hour, through the gray and unmarked afternoon whose light was little different from what it had been at dawn and which would become darkness without any graduation. Then Sam stopped us.

“This is far enough,” he said. “He’ll be coming upwind, and he don’t want to smell the mules.”

So we dismounted and tied them and followed Sam on foot through the markless afternoon, through the unpathed woods.

“You got time,” Sam said to me once. “We’ll get there before he does.”

So I tried to go slower. That is, I tried to slow, decelerate, the dizzy rush of time in which the buck which I had not even seen was moving, which it seemed to me was carrying him farther and farther and more and more irretrievably away from us even though there were no dogs behind him to make him run yet. So we went on; it seemed to me that it was for another hour. Then suddenly we were on a ridge. I had never been in there before and you could not see the ridge; you just knew that the earth had risen slightly because the undergrowth had thinned a little and the ground which you could not see slanted, sloping away toward a dense brake of cane.

“This is it,” Sam said. “You all follow the ridge and you will come to two crossings. You can see the tracks.”

Boon and Walter went on. Soon they had disappeared, and once more Sam and I were standing motionless in a clump of switchlike bushes against the trunk of a pin oak, and again there was nothing, as in the morning. There was the soaring and somber solitude in the dim light, there was the thin whisper of the faint cold rain
which had not ceased all day; then, as if it had waited for us to find our positions and become still, the wilderness breathed again. It seemed to lean inward above us, above Walter, and Boon, and Sam and me in our separate lurking-places, tremendous, attentive, impartial, and omniscient, the buck moving in it too somewhere, not running since he had not been pursued, not frightened and never fearsome but just alert too as we were alert, perhaps already circling back, perhaps quite near, conscious too of the eye of the ancient immortal Umpire. Because I was just twelve then, and that morning something had happened to me: in less than a second I had ceased forever to be the child I was yesterday. Or perhaps this made no difference, perhaps even a city-bred man, let alone a child, could not have understood it; perhaps only a country-bred one could comprehend loving the life he spills. I began to shake again.

“I’m glad it’s started now,” I whispered. “Then it will be gone when I raise the gun—”

“Hush,” Sam said.

“Is he that near?” I whispered. We did not move to speak: only our lips shaping the expiring words. “Do you think—”

“Hush,” Sam said. So I hushed. But I could not stop the shaking. I did not try, because I knew that it would go away when I needed the steadiness, since Sam Fathers had already made me a hunter. So we stood there, motionless, scarcely breathing. If there had been any sun it would be near to setting now; there was a condensing, a densifying, of what I thought was the gray and unchanging light until I realized it was my own breathing, my heart, my blood—something, and that Sam had marked me indeed with something he had had of his vanished and forgotten people. Then I stopped breathing, there was only my heart, my blood, and in the following silence the wilderness ceased to breathe too, leaning, stooping overhead with held breath, tremendous and impartial and waiting. Then the shaking stopped too, as I had known it would, and I slipped the safety off the gun.

Then it had passed. It was over. The solitude did not breathe again yet; it had merely stopped watching me and was looking somewhere else, and I knew as well as if I had seen him that the buck had come to the edge of the cane and had either seen or scented us and had faded back into it. But still the solitude was not breathing, it was merely looking somewhere else. So I did not move
yet, and then, a second after I realized what I was listening for, we heard it—the flat single clap of Walter Ewell’s rifle following which you did not need to wait for the horn. Then the sound of the horn itself came down the ridge and something went out of me too and I knew then that I had never really believed that I should get the shot.

“I reckon that’s all,” I said. “Walter got him.”

I had shifted the gun forward, my thumb on the safety again and I was already moving out of the thicket when Sam said:

“Wait.” And I remember how I turned upon him in the truculence of a boy’s grief over the missed chance, the missed luck.

“Wait?” I said. “What for? Don’t you hear that horn?”

And I remember how he was standing. He had not moved. He was not tall, he was rather squat and broad, and I had been growing fast for the past year or so and there was not much difference between us, yet he was looking over my head. He was looking across me and up the ridge toward the sound of Walter’s horn and he did not see me; he just knew I was there, he did not see me. And then I saw the buck. He was coming down the ridge; it was as if he were walking out of the very sound of the horn which signified a kill. He was not running; he was walking, tremendous, unhurried, slanting and tilting his head to pass his antlers through the undergrowth, and I standing there with Sam beside me now instead of behind me as he always stood and the gun which I knew I was not going to use already slanted forward and the safety already off.

Then he saw us. And still he did not begin to flee. He just stopped for an instant, taller than any man, looking at us, then his muscles suppled, gathered. He did not even alter his course, not fleeing, not even running, just moving with that winged and effortless ease with which deer move, passing within twenty feet of us, his head high and the eye not proud and not haughty but just full and wild and unafraid, and Sam standing beside me now, his right arm lifted at full length and the hand turned palm-outward, and speaking in that tongue which I had learned from listening to him and Joe Baker, while up the ridge Walter Ewell’s horn was still blowing us in to a dead buck.

“Oleh, Chief,” he said. “Grandfather.”

When we reached Walter he was standing with his back toward us, looking down at the deer. He didn’t look up at all.

“Come here, Sam,” he said quietly. When we reached him he still did not look up, standing there over a little spike buck which even last spring had still been a fawn. “He was so little I pretty near let him go,” Walter said. “But just look at the track he was making. It’s pretty near big as a cow’s. If there were any more tracks here besides the ones he is laying in, I would swear there was another buck that I never even saw.”

   It was after dark when we reached the road where the surrey was waiting. It was turning cold, the rain had stopped, and the sky was beginning to blow clear. Father and Major de Spain and Uncle Ike had a fire going. “Did you get him?” father said.

“Got a good-sized swamp-rabbit with spike horns,” Walter said, sliding the little buck down from his mule.