The Bear

“It was of 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. Of Indian ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it had been his to convey.”

This quote from the story’s second paragraph sets the tone for what follows: an indictment of the human tendency to claim ownership of natural things. Here, neither Indigenous peoples nor European settlers are blameless, as both participate in the farce of buying and selling land. Faulkner characterizes the pieces of land for sale as just that—fragments of a larger whole that neither can nor should be divided.

“He had already inherited then, without ever having seen it, the big old bear with one trap-ruined foot that in an area almost a hundred miles square had earned for himself a name, a definite designation like a living man.”

The McCaslin family plantation is not Isaac’s only inheritance. He also inherits, almost instinctively, a relationship with Old Ben and the territory he dominates. Though he does not gain ownership or money from this latter inheritance, he comes to prefer it to his familial inheritance for reasons he has a difficult time articulating to McCaslin.

“That doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes […], and through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant.”

Here, Faulkner characterizes the destruction of the wilderness not as one or more dramatic events, but rather as a slow accumulation of small annoyances. Though the people in this scenario are clearly outmatched by the wilderness and the bear who prowls it in terms of strength, grandeur, nobility, and longevity, the wilderness is “doomed” to lose because of the relentless, incessant nature of the assault.