Big Woods by William Faulkner

Author:William Faulkner [Faulkner, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-79222-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-17T16:00:00+00:00

2

THE

OLD PEOPLE

1. At first there was nothing. There was the faint, cold, steady rain, the gray and constant light of the late November dawn, with the voices of the hounds converging somewhere in it and toward them. Then Sam Fathers, standing just behind the boy as he had been standing when the boy shot his first running rabbit with his first gun and almost with the first load it ever carried, touched his shoulder and he began to shake, not with any cold. Then the buck was there. He did not come into sight; he was just there, looking not like a ghost but as if all of light were condensed in him and he were the source of it, not only moving in it but disseminating it, already running, seen first as you always see the deer, in that split second after he has already seen you, already slanting away in that first soaring bound, the antlers even in that dim light looking like a small rocking-chair balanced on his head.

“Now,” Sam Fathers said, “shoot quick, and slow.”

The boy did not remember that shot at all. He would live to be eighty, as his father and his father’s twin brother and their father in his turn had lived to be, but he would never hear that shot nor remember even the shock of the gun-butt. He didn’t even remember what he did with the gun afterward. He was running. Then he was standing over the buck where it lay on the wet earth still in the attitude of speed and not looking at all dead, standing over it shaking and jerking, with Sam Fathers beside him again, extending the knife. “Don’t walk up to him in front,” Sam said. “If he ain’t dead, he will cut you all to pieces with his feet. Walk up to him from behind and take him by the horn first, so you can hold his head down until you can jump away. Then slip your other hand down and hook your fingers in his nostrils.”

The boy did that—drew the head back and the throat taut and drew Sam Fathers’ knife across the throat and Sam stooped and dipped his hands in the hot smoking blood and wiped them back and forth across the boy’s face. Then Sam’s horn rang in the wet gray woods and again and again; there was a boiling wave of dogs about them, with Tennie’s Jim and Boon Hogganbeck whipping them back after each had had a taste of the blood, then the men, the true hunters—Walter Ewell whose rifle never missed, and Major de Spain and old General Compson and the boy’s cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of his father’s sister, sixteen years his senior and, since both he and McCaslin were only children and the boy’s father had been nearing seventy when he was born, more his brother than his cousin and more his father than either—sitting their horses and looking down at them: at the old man

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