Fishing Camp|Hunting Camp (Location Key)

This camp in the wilderness on the southern side of the Tallahatchie River appears in a dozen different fictions, and is the scene of a number of major events - including the deaths of six human characters and a dog named Lion. It first appears as the old shack where Wash lives with his granddaughter in "Wash," which describes it memorably as "a crazy shack on a slough in the river bottom on the Sutpen place, which Sutpen had built for a fishing lodge in his bachelor days and which had since fallen in dilapidation from disuse, so that now it looked like an aged or sick wild beast crawled terrifically there to drink in the act of dying" (536). Wash and Sutpen are two of the people who die there, in a violent event that also provides Absalom, Absalom! with one of its climactic horrors. In the other ten texts the camp belongs to Major de Spain, who converts it to a hunting camp which is described in increasingly elaborate terms. In Go Down, Moses it is "a paintless six-room bungalow set on piles above the spring high-water" (184). "A Bear Hunt" mentions the detached kitchen where the hunters' Negro servants eat and prepare meals for the white men. In Faulkner's last novel, The Reivers, around "the lodge" are also "stables and kennels" for the mules, horses and dogs (18). In the hunting stories it often feels like a place to escape from time and history, especially as the site where Sam Fathers initiates Ike McCaslin into the eternal values of the big woods, but chronologically it begins as the blood-stained ground on which Wash and Sutpen destroy each other, and according to Ike's thoughts in "Delta Autumn," by 1940 "the house itself no longer exists" (274). (See also the entry for the Hunting Camp Kitchen in this index.)