Unnamed "Hunters"

There are various groups of hunters in the Yoknapatawpha fictions. These "hunters" are the essentially transcendent community created by the narrator at the start of the chapter called "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses. In this passage, "hunters" refers not to any specific characters but to an exalted meta-cultural and spiritual category of "men": they are "not white nor black nor red but men, hunters" (181). They are explicitly distinguished from "women," "boys," and "children" by the "brown liquor" they drink (almost a kind of communion wine, a "condensation of the wild immortal spirit" of the wilderness) and by their liturgy: the stories they tell about hunting. According to this passage, even the camp cooks are "hunters first and cooks afterward" (185). It's fair to say, however, that in the actual narrative, the social order and its racial and class divisions persist even in the woods.