Ike soon learned that the hunt was more than bagging bears and deer. He came to realize that it was the pursuit which was paramount, not necessarily the prizes it promised: The hunt was simply a symbol of pursuit. Most of anyone's life is a purs

Just as Old Bear symbolized the wilderness, the hunt symbolized the rituals that man needed to perpetuate his illusion of the world and of his place in it. This lesson was not lost on young Ike: "To him, they were not going to hunt bear and deer but to keep yearly rendezvous with the bear which they did not even intend to kill" (Cowley 199). As literary scholar Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber noted in her article about Faulkner’s collection of short stories, "Nature, for Ike, is the fantasy upon which the consistency of his being depends. Ike preserves the wilderness by giving it a place outside of the symbolic order in the fantasy space that regulates his desire... Ike must preserve his ideal of the morally beneficial wilderness in order to sustain his identity as an individual. Ike receives his recognition as a subject from the wilderness by immersing himself in its rituals and being a ‘worthy’ opponent" (477).

uit of something.... [The hunt teaches] not only to pursue but to ... let go because then tomorrow you can pursue again... The pursuit is the thing, not the reward, the gain" (Schreiber 477). There would always be one elusive bear always lurking in the shadows -- the stuff from which legends are made. In "The Bear," his name was Old Ben. This bear symbolizes the wilderness to Faulkner -- huge, intimidating, primitive, untouched by man. When men organize together in a hunting party, they are re-establishing their ties with nature, remembering what it was life before civilization pervaded every aspect of their lives. Man does not have to learn how to become one with nature -- it is instinctive, and when he enters the wilderness for the first time, it is more like a sense of deja-vu instead of a virgin experience. As Ike observed on his first hunting trip as a ten-year-old,

Some topics in this essay:
Isaac McCaslin’s, Faulkner Lion, Nature Ike, Sam Ike, Sam Fathers, Ike Sam, Jaffe Schreiber, , William Faulkner, schreiber 477, hunting party, bear deer, sam fathers,