wash his face, was warmly welcomed by his young wife at the end of the day.
On another occasion at Chee-Ha, William and his companions enjoyed a
capital hunt among thickets of myrtle and mallow, firing from horseback,
standing, and crawling on their knees, as men and prey converged. At one
point a leaping deer almost joined William on his horse but, twisting itself
in midflight, brushed Elliott’s knee on its descent. William flipped down his
gun, ‘‘pistol-fashion, with a rapid twitch, and sent the whole charge through
his backbone.’’ The deer writhed on the ground by his horse’s feet. The
hunter dismounted, wrestled the animal into exhaustion, and dispatched it
with his knife. Still clutching his bloody blade by its handle, William heard
a friend’s gun, and suddenly ‘‘another deer was upon me!’’ By the time he
recovered his gun from the underbrush, this deer had disappeared, but not
for long. Crawling among the myrtles, William spotted the creature, ‘‘and
to my joy and surprise,another deer is mine!’’ (–). Later, the dogs still
scattered, men exhausted, and William covered in blood, one of the hunters
sent a slave for a cart. Four dead deer needed transport, and a twenty-five-
pound wild turkey hung from the saddle of one of William’s companions.
William exulted: ‘‘How pleasant to eat! Shall I say it?—how much pleasanter
to give away! Ah, how such things do win their way tohearts—men’s, and
women’stoo!’’ William could not resist a bit of Carolina chauvinism, either,
taunting Long Island sportsmen obliged to restock and manage game on
protected club grounds. ‘‘Ours was nopreserveshooting!...Theywere wild
deer, of the wild woods, that we slew, this day at Chee-Ha!’’ (–).
tYet the image of blood-covered men celebrating charity sits with me
uncomfortably. Elliott himself once declared that a ‘‘sportsmen, who gives a
true description of his sports,must be an egotist.Itishisnecessity’’ (). He
referred to participants’ perspective (as well as self-interest) in the making
of hunting narratives. InCarolina Sports, charity—whether fish or veni-
son given to the enslaved (people and dogs) or classy neighbors, especially
women—seems simply more egotism of the masculine sort, and a bit dis-
honest. Slaughter for glory seems the better construction.
What a contrast to the brutal transparency of the imperial Spanish,
whose termmatanzas—massacre or slaughter^12 —remains the name of cer-
tain spots around the world: a zone (now industrial) outside Buenos Aires,
a province of El Salvador, a bay in Cuba, and on this continent, a river
in northeastern Florida and a creek in California. From about the mid-
seventeenth century until their departure in , the Spanish maintained
enormous cattle ranches along the coastal plain east of Rio San Juan (subse-