Summary
As Isaac grows older, he becomes an expert hunter and woodsman, and continues going with the hunting parties every year. The group becomes increasingly preoccupied with hunting down Old Ben, a monstrous, almost immortal bear that wreaks havoc throughout the forest. Old Ben's foot was maimed in a trap, and he seems impervious to bullets.
Isaac learns to track Old Ben, but hunting him is futile, because all the hounds fear him. Sam Fathers, who teaches Isaac Old Ben's ways, says that it will take an extraordinary dog to bring Old Ben down.
Isaac sees Old Ben several times. Once, they send a tiny fyce-dog with no sense of danger after him, and Isaac has a shot at the huge bear. But instead of taking the shot, Isaac runs after the fyce and dives to save him from the bear. Isaac looks up at Old Ben looming over him and remembers the image from his dreams about the bear.
At last they find a dog capable of bringing Old Ben to bay: Lion, a huge, wild Airedale Terrier mix with extraordinary courage and savagery. Sam makes Lion semi-tame by starving him until he will allow himself to be touched; soon, Boon Hogganbeck has devoted himself to Lion and even shares a bed with him.
Using Lion, they nearly catch Old Ben, but Boon misses five point-blank shots. General Compson hits the bear and draws blood, but Old Ben escapes into the forest.
Isaac and Boon go into Memphis to buy whisky for the men, and the next day, they go after the bear again. General Compson declares that he wants Isaac to ride Kate, the only mule who is not afraid of wild animals and, therefore, the best chance any of the men have to get close enough to the bear to kill him.
In the deep woods, near the river, Lion leaps at Old Ben and takes hold of his throat. Old Ben seizes Lion and begins shredding his stomach with its claws. Boon draws his knife and throws himself on top of the bear, stabbing it in its back. Old Ben dies, and a few days later, Lion dies. Sam Fathers collapses after the fight and dies not long after Lion. Lion and Sam are buried in the same clearing.
Isaac returns to the farm near Jefferson, to the old McCaslin plantation. Time passes; eventually he is 21, time for him to assume control of the plantation, which is his by inheritance. But he renounces it in favor of his older cousin (once-removed), McCaslin Edmonds. Isaac has a long argument with McCaslin in which Isaac declares his belief that the land cannot be owned, that the curse of God's Earth is man's attempt to own the land, and that curse has led to slavery and the destruction of the South. McCaslin tries to convince him to accept the land, with a convoluted metaphysical argument about the fated responsibilities the white race has taken on. But Isaac remembers reading the old ledger books of Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy, piecing together the sordid story of the plantation's slaves, and he refuses the inheritance.
(One of Isaac's inferences is particularly appalling: Tomey, the slave whom Carothers McCaslin took as a lover and begat Turl, may also have been Carothers McCaslin's daughter by another slave, Eunice, who committed suicide shortly before Turl's birth. From this and other factors, Isaac deduces that she must also have been Carothers McCaslin's lover.)
After refusing the inheritance, Isaac moves into town and becomes a carpenter, eschewing material possessions. He marries a woman who urges him to take back the plantation, but he still refuses when she attempts to convince him sexually. It is suggested there are no further conjugal relations between them after this as they have no children. Isaac tries to distribute fairly the money left to the children of Tomey's Turl and Tennie. He travels to Arkansas to give a thousand dollars to Lucas' sister, Fonsiba, now married to a scholarly negro farmer, who seems to neglect both his farm and wife. She refuses the money, but Isaac arranges for a nearby bank to pay it out in small monthly portions. Isaac continues to hunt and spend all the time he can in the woods.
One November, a few years later, he and a few of the old hunting group return to the wilderness camp where they had stalked Old Ben for so many years. Major de Spain has sold it to a logging company, and the trains come closer and louder than before. The wilderness is gradually being whittled away by farmers and loggers. Isaac visits the graves of Lion and Sam Fathers, then goes to find Boon Hogganbeck. Boon is in a clearing full of squirrels, trying to fix his gun. As Isaac enters, Boon shouts at him not to touch any of the squirrels: "They're mine!" he cries.
Publication history
"The Bear" has a complex publication history. Its earliest version, first published in The Saturday Evening Post (May 9, 1942), differs substantially from the Go Down, Moses version. A third version was published in Faulkner's collection of hunting stories, Big Woods (1955).
