Walter Ewell

Walter Ewell is a farmer in Yoknapatawpha, but in the six fictions where he appears or is mentioned he is always described as (to quote The Mansion) one of the "best hunters in the county" (34) - an assertion born out repeatedly on the annual hunting trips to Major de Spain's camp in the woods. When the unnamed boy in "The Bear" hunts his first deer on his own it is symbolically appropriate that "he borrows Walter Ewell's rifle" to do so (290). Ewell is also part of the party of Yoknapatawpha hunters who, after World War II, travel to the Delta to hunt in "Race at Morning," which makes him another of the characters in Faulkner's cast whose date of birth varies widely from text to text.