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deliberation of a locomotive, the shaggy tremendous shape. It ran in his knowledge before he ever saw it. It loomed and towered in his dreams before he ever saw the unaxed woods where it left its crooked print, shaggy, tremendous, red-eyed, not malevolent but just big, too big for the dogs which tried to bay it, for the horses which tried to ride it, for the menand the bullets they fired into it; too big for the very country which was its constricting scope.
    See the outer edges of this bear becoming abstract—but this bear is not the fox. “It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet …”
    For this bear belongs to the world, the world of experience:
    that doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear earned a name, 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;—the old bear, solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowered, childless, and absolved of mortality—old Priam, reft of his old wife, and outliving all his sons.
    Experience in the world is the very thread this story is put together with. Here is the footprint:
    Then, standing beside Sam in the thick great gloom of ancient wood and the winter’s dying afternoon, he looked quietly down at the rotted log scored and gutted with claw marks and, in the wet earth beside it, the printof the enormous warped two-toed foot … For the first time he realized that the bear which had run in his listening and loomed in his dreams since before he could remember, and which therefore must have existed in the listening and the dreams of his cousin and Major de Spain and even old General Compson before they began to remember in their turn, was a mortal animal and that they had departed for the camp each November with no actual intention of slaying it, not because it could not be slain but because so far they had no actual hope of being able to.
    Faulkner achieves the startling reality and nearness of the outside world by alternately dilating reality to the reach of abstraction and bringing it home with a footprint. It is reality that not only
is
, but
looms
—and this not just one time to one character, but over and over, with an insistent quality.
    There are several encounters between Ike McCaslin and the bear. The final one is a death struggle when the bear is
    on its hind feet, its back against a tree while the bellowing hounds swirled around it and once more Lion [the mongrel dog that is his match] drove in, leaping clear of the ground. This time the bear didn’t strike him down. It caught the dog in both arms, almost loverlike, and they both went down.
    There is a terrible fight, Lion clings to the bear’s throat and the bear tears at Lion’s body and wounds him mortally, but Lion will not let go. Boon, Lion’s trainer who loveshim, when Lion is clawed, runs toward them, a knife in his hand. He flings himself astride the bear and the knife falls.
    It fell just once … The bear then surged erect, raising with it the man and the dog too, and turned and still carrying the man and the dog it took two or three steps towards the woods on its hind feet as a man would have walked and crashed down. It didn’t collapse, crumple. It fell all of a piece, as a tree falls, so that all three of them, man, dog and bear, seemed to bounce once.
    The bear and the dog die of this, and so does Sam Fathers, the Indian, who is found lying motionless face down in the trampled mud when it’s all over: not a mark on him, “he just quit.” The bodies of the bear and Sam, open-eyed, teeth bared, brown—childless,