Unnamed Boy Hunter|Narrator 10

In Go Down, Moses this character is Ike McCaslin, the novel's central figure, but in both "The Old People" and "The Bear," originally published as magazine stories before being revised and incorporated into the novel, he is a lot harder to name. In all three texts, he's a child of white privilege who has been taught how to conduct oneself as a hunter - which is to say, how to be the right kind of man - by Sam Fathers, mixed race son of a Chickasaw chief. According to Joseph Blotner, in a typescript of "The Old People" the boy's father is "Mr Compson," which suggests Faukner originally cast Quentin Compson in the role. "The Bear" was written after Go Down, Moses, but Faulkner removed all indications that the boy was Ike McCaslin before publishing it in The Saturday Evening Post. His story remains essentially the same. As indicated by the "old heavy biscuit-thick silver watch" that he carries in "The Old People" - a gift from his grandfather - he's a member of one of the old Yoknapatawpha families and the presumptive heir of a plantation (289). But he finds a different reality from the class- and race-bound Southern one under Sam's tutelage in the wilderness: "the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document of white man fatuous enough to believe he had bought any fragment of it" (293). His encounters with deer and especially the ancient bear named Old Ben are spiritual experiences.