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Old Ben

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I have just read for the third or fourth time William Faulkner’s short novel The Bear—this time in the version used for the author’s Big Woods (1955) collection of hunting stories. All the other times were in the version used for Go Down Moses (1942). Here Sam Fathers talks to Ike McCaslin and Ash about the bear Old Ben.

“He do it every year,” Sam said. “Once: Ash and Boon say he comes up here to run the other little bears away. Tell them to get the hell out of here and stay out until the hunters are gone. Maybe.” The boy no longer heard anything at all, yet still Sam’s head continued to turn gradually and steadily until the back of it was toward him. Then it turned back and looked down at him—the same face, grave, familiar, expressionless until it smiled, the same old man’s eyes from which as he watched there faded slowly a quality darkly and fiercely lambent, passionate and proud. “He dont care no more for bears than he does for dogs or men neither. He come to see who’s here, who’s new in camp this year, whether he can shoot or not, can stay or not. Whether we got the dog yet that can bay and hold him until a man gets there with a gun. Because he’s the head bear. He’s the man.”


Tiger Hunting

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Jim Corbett with Man-Eating Tiger

There are relatively few tigers left in the world today; but, a hundred years ago, there were individual tigers who were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of villagers in the northwest Indian region of Kumaon, just west of Nepal. Perhaps the most famous of the “white hunters” of these man-eating tigers was Edward James Corbett, better known as Jim Corbett (1875-1955).

Now what am I doing talking about a killer of endangered tigers? Surprisingly, Corbett himself was a naturalist:

A tiger’s function in the scheme of things is to help maintain the balance in nature and if, on rare occasions, when driven by dire necessity, he kills a human being or when his natural food has been ruthlessly exterminated by man he kills two percent of the cattle he is alleged to have killed, it is not fair that for these acts a whole species should be branded as being cruel or bloodthirsty.

Corbett is as famous for photographing and preserving the tiger population as he is for hunting them. In the introduction to his most famous book, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, he writes:

When, therefore, a tiger is suffering from one or more painful wounds, or when its teeth or missing or defective and its claws worn down, and it is unable to catch the animals it has been accustomed to eating, it is driven by necessity to killing human beings.

I was surprised how well-written his book is. He is able to produce an elegant word picture of the circumstances of each hunt. Because of the strength and agility even of man-eating tigers, one rarely has time to reload if one misses. Even if he shoots his prey in the head, the tiger can survive long enough to make a meal of his hunter.