View of the World from Different Ages

In the story of the Bear the young boy was not allowed to join the hunt until he was ten years old.   He was taught all the stories and heard all the legends of the great bear with the crooked print his entire childhood and he knew all about the great bear everyone always was talking about.   As people grow older they are maturing in ways to prepare them for life and all of the hardest tasks that will be put in front of them.   This boy was told many stories of the bear, some of them had extreme exaggeration, and others didn’t.   All the stories he heard were to help him when his time came to face the bear.  

When the boy had his first chance to go out on a hunting trip with the men the first thing Sam told him was “Be scared, you cant help that, but don’t be afraid. Ain’t nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.”(793) At the age of ten he was ready to shoot the bear, and yet he never had the chance to see it, because the bear knew the boy was a coward at the time and the bear knew he would shoot him because the boy did not yet respect him as the more experienced hunters did.   The boy felt the bear and this taught him even more than he already knew about it from the stories he had been told.   “He realized for he first time that the bear which had run in his listening and loomed in his dreams since before he could remember to the contrary and which, therefore, must have existed in the listening and dreams of his father and Major de Spain and even old General Compson, too, before they began to remember in their turn, was a mortal animal, and that if they had departed for the camp each November without any actual hope of bringing its trophy back, it was not because it could not be slain, but because so far they had no actual hope too.”(791) These kinds of things are what he was constantly being told and not that he...