Tree Stand in Go Down, Moses (Location)

The hunting "stand" where young Isaac McCaslin waits with Sam Fathers for a shot at his first deer is in the middle of what Faulkner calls "the big woods" (167), a mixture of "tremendous gums and cypresses and oaks where no axe save that of the hunter had ever sounded" (168). In deer hunting a "stand" can mean an elevated platform attached to a tree. Ike's stand is "against a tremendous pin oak" (172). In this case, however, "stand" simply means the place in the woods allotted to Ike by the hunting party, "one of the poorer stands . . . since he was only" a boy (167), probably at one end of a widely-spaced line of hunters.