Novella: The Bear

Overview
William Faulkner’s “The Bear,” first published in 1942 as part of Go Down, Moses, unfolds as both a hunting tale and a spiritual, ethical reckoning with the American South. Set across several Novembers in Mississippi’s “big woods,” the novella tracks Isaac “Ike” McCaslin from boyhood to adulthood, tracing his initiation into the wilderness, the legendary pursuit of a near-mythic bear called Old Ben, and his later renunciation of his plantation inheritance after confronting the legacy of slavery and misused land.

The Hunt and Initiation
The story opens with the ritual of the annual hunting camp on Major de Spain’s land. Ike, mentored by Sam Fathers, a man of Chickasaw and African ancestry who embodies an older code of stewardship, learns that to enter the woods one must shed the tools of mastery. He leaves behind compass, watch, and even his gun, surrenders his need to control, and is rewarded with a wordless encounter: Old Ben materializes, scarred and huge, with a mangled paw from an old trap. The bear’s presence is not merely quarry but a force of time and wilderness, older than property lines and men’s designs.

Year after year the camp returns: General Compson, Major de Spain, Boon Hogganbeck, and others circle the same rites, food, stories, tracks, and near misses. The balance shifts with the arrival of Lion, an enormous, half-wild dog that Boon coaxes and Sam trains. Lion is the violent counterpart to Old Ben’s ancient cunning, and his presence makes the final confrontation inevitable.

Death of Old Ben
On the culminating hunt, Lion takes Old Ben’s trail and catches him in a furious, primal clash. The boy, now more man than novice, witnesses the end of the legend: Lion and Old Ben tear at one another in a death grapple as Boon, howling, rushes in and knives the bear. The kill is victory and desecration at once. Lion dies of his wounds, and Sam Fathers, whose heart has been bound to the bear as to a vanished order, collapses and soon dies. The camp breaks, and with it the fragile covenant between men and the woods.

The Ledgers and Renunciation
In the long central meditation, Ike turns twenty-one and reads the McCaslin plantation ledgers with his older cousin and guardian, McCaslin Edmonds. The accounts reveal the patriarch Carothers McCaslin’s exploitation: children fathered with enslaved women; money left in ledger notations rather than justice; an incestuous line that makes the plantation both profitable and cursed. Ike concludes that the land itself bears the stain of bondage and ownership, that the very notion of title is a blasphemy against the earth’s older order.

He refuses his inheritance, arguing that the land must be relinquished and that his duty is to live humbly, working with his hands and leaving the soil unclaimed. His cousin counters with practicality and law, insisting that responsibility lies in stewardship within the world as it is. Ike holds to renunciation, a personal atonement that cannot cleanse the past but can refuse to profit from it.

Aftermath and Vanishing Wilderness
Years later Ike revisits the camp, now sold to lumbermen. The big woods lie cutover and stark, the covenant broken by commerce as thoroughly as Old Ben was by knife. He finds Boon up a great gum tree, raging and possessive, guarding a scurry of squirrels as if they were treasure. “You can’t have any of them, they’re mine,” Boon shouts, a grotesque echo of ownership diminished to scraps. Ike turns away, knowing the age of Old Ben and Sam Fathers has ended, and with it the possibility of the old balance.

Themes
“The Bear” fuses a boy’s initiation with a cultural reckoning: wilderness versus property, humility versus dominion, memory versus ledger. Old Ben embodies a world older than law; Lion and Boon represent the violent, human urge to conquer it; Sam Fathers preserves a code that cannot survive the market. Ike’s renunciation does not restore the woods, but it names the guilt and refuses its profit, leaving the story suspended between loss and the stubborn flicker of moral choice.