Boon Hogganbeck

Boon, according to Quentin, "didn't have any profession or trade, or even job: he just did whatever Major de Spain told him to do" (185). He is part of the hunting party out of his fidelity to Major de Spain. He is "part Indian," descended in this one story from Indian royalty: his grandmother was a "Chickasaw woman, niece of the chief who once owned the land" where they hunt (184). In "Lion" he is about forty years old and, as elsewhere, he is described as six feet, four inches tall. Quentin also says "he had the mind of a child and the heart of a horse and the ugliest face I ever saw" (184), red and wrinkled and with eyes "like shoebuttons, without depth, without meanness or generosity or viciousness or gentleness or anything at all: just something to see with" (185). The champion and caretaker of Lion, Boon acts nobly at the risk of his life when he comes to Lion's aid in the climax of the hunt for Old Ben. He is later appointed the town marshal at Hoke's mill by De Spain, but the story's last scene seems calculated to bring his story - if not the idea of hunting - to an anti-climax. Boon also figures importantly in Go Down, Moses (1942) and throughout Big Woods (1955). He is, finally, one of the principal characters in The Reivers (1962).