Reading this in November, the month the story begins in.

A boy and a legend. Old Ben has been around forever, the boy just 10 years. Then 14. Age, wisdom, and life itself play out as the boy seeks out the bear. A short, but complex read. ( )

complex story of growing up and discovering one's heritage for good & ill

El oso es sin duda uno de los más espléndidos y significativos relatos de William Faulkner. La renuncia de Isaac McCaslin, su protagonista, a la herencia del viejo Carothers, es el resultado de una radical negativa a reconocer la propiedad sobre una tierra corrompida por la codicia de sus ocupantes. Para Isaac, fascinado por la naturaleza virgen del Gran Valle, Old Ben, el viejo oso al que los hombres de Jefferson acosan implacablemente, es «un anacronismo indomable e invencible surgido de un tiempo antiguo y muerto, un fantasma, compendio y apoteosis de la antigua vida salvaje». El final del Old Ben es también el de los grandes bosques amenazados por las compañías madereras, un escenario donde la ceremonia anual de la caza reaviva todavía el espíritu de un tiempo aún no maldito en que la tierra era de los hombres «no de los blancos, ni de los negros, ni de los rojos, sino de los hombres, de los cazadores, con la voluntad y la osadía de resistir y la humildad y el arte de sobrevivir». Todas las obsesiones fundamentales de la intensa narrativa faulkneriana concurren en este relato, una auténtica obra maestra, arrastradas por la fuerza de un estilo soberbiamente elaborado. ( )

"Courage and honor and pride, and pity and love of justice and of liberty. They all touch the heart, and what the heart holds to become truth, as far as we know truth."
The story of a boy, Isaac, who joins a hunting party for several summers, trying to kill Old Ben, an almost immortal and huge bear, a kind of a legend and a symbol of the power and the balance of nature. Seven times Isaac sees it, and once he forgives its life, forming a kind of unspoken tie with each other. Sam Fathers, a Negro who accompanies the party, becomes Isaac' greatest teacher and only friend.
The beast is eventually killed in a rather violent scene in which a huge, half-mad dog called Lion is badly hurt, and Boon, a half-mad, obsessed man kills the bear with his own hands. Sam Fathers dies shortly after.
When Isaac turns 21 he remembers that scene of some years ago, merging his own reflections on freedom and property; and Sam Fathers, Boon and the bear become living metaphors for slavery, the endless ambition of human beings to submit nature and his own beliefs on liberty and of justice.
For me, maybe the most complex of Faulkner's tales so far, but at the same time, an unbelievably beautiful utopia in which it's possible to believe that human beings can coexist in harmony with the natural world, even if our most inner desire is to rule and to finally annihilate it. ( )