With the gun which was too big for him$$$ the breech-loader which did not even belong to him but to Major de Spain and which he had fired only once$$$ at a stump on the first day to learn the recoil and how to reload it with the paper shells$$$ he stood against a big gum tree beside a little bayou whose black still water crept without motion out of a cane-brake$$$ across a small clearing and into the cane again$$$ where$$$ invisible$$$ a bird$$$ the big woodpecker called Lord-to-God by negroes$$$ clattered at a dead trunk. It was a stand like any other stand$$$ dissimilar only in incidentals to the one where he had stood each morning for two weeks; a territory new to him yet no less familiar than that other one which after two weeks he had come to believe he knew a little--the same solitude$$$ the same loneliness through which frail and timorous man had merely passed without altering it$$$ leaving no mark nor scar$$$ which looked exactly as it must have looked when the first ancestor of Sam fathers' Chickasaw predecessors crept into it and looked about him$$$ club or stone axe or bone arrow drawn and ready$$$ different only because$$$ squatting at the edge of the kitchen$$$ he had smelled the dogs huddled and cringing beneath it and saw the raked ear and side of the bitch that$$$ as Sam had said$$$ had to be brave once in order to keep on calling herself a dog$$$ and saw yesterday in the earth beside the gutted log$$$ the print of the living foot. He heard no dogs at all. He never did certainly hear them. He only heard the drumming of the woodpecker stop short off$$$ and knew that the bear was looking at him. he did not move$$$ holding the useless gun which he knew now he would never fire at it$$$ now or ever$$$ tasting in his saliva that taint of brass which he had smelled in the huddled dogs when he peered under the kitchen.
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