William Faulkner - Big Woods

T HE M ARBLE F AUN (1924)
S OLDIERS P AY (1926)
M OSQUITOES (1927)
S ARTORIS (1929) [F LAGS IN THE D UST (1973)]
T HE S OUND AND THE F URY (1929)
As I L AY D YING (1930)
S ANCTUARY (1931)
T HESE 13 (1931)
L IGHT IN A UGUST (1932)
A G REEN B OUGH (1933)
D OCTOR M ARTINO AND O THER S TORIES (1934)
P YLON (1935)
A BSALOM , A BSALOM ! (1936)
T HE U NVANQUISHED (1938)
T HE W ILD P ALMS [I F I F ORGET T HEE J ERUSALEM ] (1939)
T HE H AMLET (1940)
G O D OWN , M OSES AND O THER S TORIES (1942)
I NTRUDER IN THE D UST (1948)
K NIGHTS G AMBIT (1949)
C OLLECTED S TORIES OF W ILLIAM F AULKNER (1950)
N OTES ON A H ORSETHIEF (1951)
R EQUIEM FOR A N UN (1954)
A F ABLE (1954)
B IG W OODS (1955)
T HE T OWN (1957)
T HE M ANSION (1959)
T HE R EIVERS (1962)
U NCOLLECTED S TORIES OF W ILLIAM F AULKNER (1979, POSTHUMOUS )

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 1994

Copyright1931, 1940, 1942, 1951, 1955 by William Faulkner
Copyright1930, 1934, 1954, 1955 by The Curtis Publishing Company
Copyright renewed 1958, 1959 by William Faulkner
Copyright renewed 1962, 1968, 1970 by Estelle Faulkner and
Jill Faulkner Summers
Copyright renewed 1979, 1982, 1983 by Jill Faulkner Summers

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York and simultaneously in
Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally
published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1955.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Faulkner, William, 18971962.
Big woods: the hunting stories / by William Faulkner. 1st
Vintage international ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79222-8
1. Hunting stories, American. I. Title.
PS3511.A86B54 1994
813.52dc20 94-5687

v3.1

Mississippi:

The rich deep black alluvial soil which would grow cotton taller than the head of a man on a horse, already one jungle one brake one impassable density of brier and cane and vine interlocking the soar of gum and cypress and hickory and pinoak and ash, printed now by the tracks of unalien shapesbear and deer and panthers and bison and wolves and alligators and the myriad smaller beasts, and unalien men to name them too perhapsthe (themselves) nameless though recorded predecessors who built the mounds to escape the spring floods and left their meagre artifacts: the obsolete and the dispossessed, dispossessed by those who were dispossessed in turn because they too were obsolete: the wild Algonquian, Chickasaw and Choctaw and Natchez and Pascagoula, peering in virgin astonishment downfrom the tall bluffs at a Chippeway canoe bearing three Frenchmenand had barely time to whirl and look behind him at ten and then a hundred and then a thousand Spaniards come overland from the Atlantic Ocean: a tide, a wash, a thrice flux-and-ebb of motion so rapid and quick across the lands slow alluvial chronicle as to resemble the limber flicking of the magicians one hand before the other holding the deck of inconstant cards: the Frenchman for a moment, then the Spaniard for perhaps two, then the Frenchman for another two and then the Spaniard again for another and then the Frenchman for that one last second, half-breath; because then came the Anglo-Saxon, the pioneer, the tall man, roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whisky, Bible and jug in one hand and (like as not) a native tomahawk in the other, brawling, turbulent not through viciousness but simply because of his over-revved glands; uxorious and polygamous: a married invincible bachelor, dragging his gravid wife and most of the rest of his mother-in-laws family behind him into the trackless infested forest, spawning that child as like as not behind the barricade of a rifle-crotched log mapless leagues from nowhere and then getting her with another one before reaching his final itch-footed destination, and at the same time scattering his ebullient seed in a hundred dusky bellies through a thousand miles of wilderness; innocent and gullible, without bowels for avarice or compassion orforethought either, changing the face of the earth: felling a tree which took two hundred years to grow, in order to extract from it a bear or a capful of wild honey;

Obsolete too: still felling the two-hundred-year-old tree when the bear and the wild honey were gone and there was nothing in it any more but a raccoon or a possum whose hide was worth at the most two dollars, turning the earth into a howling waste from which he would be the first to vanish, not even on the heels but synchronous with the slightly darker wild men whom he had dispossessed, because, like them, only the wilderness could feed and nourish him; and so disappeared, strutted his roaring eupeptic hour, and was no more, leaving his ghost, pariah and proscribed, scriptureless now and armed only with the highwaymans, the murderers, pistol, haunting the fringes of the wilderness which he himself had helped to destroy, because the river towns marched now recessional south by south along the processional bluffs: St Louis, Paducah, Memphis, Helena, Vicksburg, Natchez, Baton Rouge, peopled by men with mouths full of law, in broadcloth and flowered waistcoats, who owned Negro slaves and Empire beds and buhl cabinets and ormolu clocks, who strolled and smoked their cigars along the bluffs beneath which in the shanty and flatboat purlieus he rioted out the last of his doomed evening, losing his worthless life again andagain to the fierce knives of his drunken and worthless kindthis in the intervals of being pursued and harried in his vanishing avatars of Harpe and Hare and Mason and Murrel, either shot on sight or hoicked, dragged out of what remained of his secret wilderness haunts along the overland Natchez trace (one day someone brought a curious seed into the land and inserted it into the earth, and now vast fields of white not only covered the waste places which with his wanton and heedless axe he had made, but were effacing, thrusting back the wilderness even faster than he had been able to, so that he barely had a screen for his back when, crouched in his thicket, he glared at his dispossessor in impotent and incredulous and uncomprehending rage) into the towns to his formal apotheosis in a courtroom and then a gallows or the limb of a tree;

Because those days were gone, the old brave innocent tumultuous eupeptic tomorrowless days; the last broadhorn and keelboat (Mike Fink was a legend; soon even the grandfathers would no longer claim to remember him, and the river hero was now the steamboat gambler wading ashore in his draggled finery from the towhead where the captain had marooned him) had been sold piecemeal for firewood in Chartres and Toulouse and Dauphine street, and Choctaw and Chickasaw braves, in short hair and overalls and armed with mule-whips inplace of war-clubs and already packed up to move west to Oklahoma, watched steamboats furrowing even the shallowest and remotest wilderness streams where tumbled gently to the motion of the paddle-wheels, the gutted rock-weighted bones of Hares and Masons murderees; a new time, a new age, millenniums beginning; one vast single net of commerce webbed and veined the midcontinents fluvial embracement; New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and Fort Bridger, Wyoming, were suburbs one to the other, inextricable in destiny; mens mouths were full of law and order, all mens mouths were round with the sound of money; one unanimous golden affirmation ululated the nations boundless immeasurable forenoon: profit plus regimen equals security: a nation of commonwealths; that crumb, that dome, that gilded pustule, that Idea risen now, suspended like a balloon or a portent or a thundercloud above what used to be wilderness, drawing, holding the eyes of all: Mississippi