The Warning

Across the nation, a morning stop at a local mom and pop restaurant, coffee shop or country store will reveal a group of old men, laughing and telling stories over their cups. At their age, my age, the stories are easily rememberred and are fondly relived in the telling. Memories are important and to many my age and beyond, they can be all that’s left of a life wonderfully, or perhaps sadly lived.

American novelist William Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, was born in New Albany, Miss., fifty-two years earlier in 1897. He was 65 years old when he died in Byhalia, Miss., in 1962, the year I was a high school sophomore. Each year as I travel to the White River National Wildlife Refuge through the Mississippi and Arkansas deltas, I’m reminded of Faulkner’s writings, especially those that take place in the big woods that are the reason I go there each year. In a collection of three stories, The Bear, A Bear Hunt, and Race At Morning, and the epillogue The Old People, Faulkner is at his best.

All this thinking of William Faulkner’s writings produces thoughts, and all men have them, of preserving the things we love most, of being good stewards, of learning from the sins of the past. Facebook provides an opportunity to see the results of hunts all over the country with photos to prove the success. As I look at these photos, some showing enormous catches of everything from gray squirrels and raccoons to black bears, I’m reminded of the bison and the carrier pigeon in this country. Game is in abundance now, but it may not always be so. Because of the abundance, and I’m reminded of particularly of the burgeoning bear populations all over the country, the need to conserve seems to be lost to the today’s generation of hunters. I’m reminded that black bears were in abundance in the eastern mountains at the turn of the twentieth century only to be nearly eradicated by the time I was old enough to hunt them. History can and will repeat itself.

In The Old People, Faulkner paints the dismal picture of what is perhaps the last annual trip to hunting camp by aging Isaac “Uncle Ike” McCauslin. In this passage, Uncle Ike, speaking in first person, says,

“God created man and He created the world for him to live in; I reckon He created the kind of a world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man – the ground to walk on, the Big Woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn’t put the desire to hunt and kill game in man, but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach himself that, since he wasn’t quite God yet. So I reckon He foreknew man would follow and kill game. I believe He said, So be it. I reckon He even foresaw the end. But He said, I will give him his chance, I will give him warning and foreknowledge too, along with the desire to follow and the power to slay. The woods and fields he ravages and the game he devastates will be the consequence and signature of his crime and guilt, and his punishment.”