sions and depredations. He is known to raid settlements not only to eat
but to commit mayhem. Slewfoot is not quite the metaphorical representa-
tive of wild nature that William Faulkner made of his Mississippian, ‘‘The
Bear,’’ in the novella of that name set about the same time as Rawlings’s fic-
tion. There is no forest-eating railroad penetrating her Florida swamp
and no Christlike human moral agony over ownership, displacement, and
power. Slewfoot’s pursuers—all men want the honor of killing him—are
uncomplicated fellows preoccupied with survival rather than the progress
of civilization. Penny, especially—he the reflective, respectful man—under-
stands and sympathizes with his bear adversary’s history and necessities.
Yet it is Penny who, after superhuman chase, finally brings Slewfoot to his
end. Penny never hesitated; rather, the opposite. It was Slewfoot or starva-
tion, after all, as simple and profound as that.
It was an earlier, unsuccessful tracking of Ole Slewfoot that situated
the title theme ofThe Yearling, that is, the ‘‘boy’s story.’’ Penny is tread-
ing carefully through thick underbrush, crouching to see the bear’s trail,
young Jodie and the dogs behind him. Reaching down to move ground
cover, Penny is struck on the arm by a ‘‘big’un,’’ an enormous rattlesnake.
Far from home and farther from the only doctor in the territory, Penny
figures himself a goner. But he spots a doe deer, fells her with shot, and
orders Jodie to remove her offal. Penny presses the liver against his snake-
bite wound and staggers off toward the Island. Penny will survive because
the doe died. Jodie, at first terrified at the prospect of his father’s death,
soon calculates that the doe lingered close to humans because she had a
fawn. With his father’s permission, he returns to the doe’s body and soon
finds the speckled offspring. Jodie wants a pet, something of ‘‘his own’’—
the dogs are all Penny’s creatures. Ma, ever fretful about the family’s food
supply, says no, but Penny, who always prevails through patience, tells Jodie
he may fetch home the fawn. Jodie shares his own table rations with his
pet and, over his mother’s new objections, brings the fawn to sleep with
him in his bed. Now he wants a fitting name for the animal, and for that he
must visit the Forresters, the youngest of whom is a crippled boy about his
age called Fodderwing, who keeps birds and, among other mammals, a rac-
coon named Racket. (Marjorie Rawlings herself had a young ’coon named
thus for a while.) Fodderwing has observed that running deer hold their
tails aloft, like flags, so Jodie’s fawn assumes the affectionate identity Flag.
Jodie’s life becomes nature idyll: He and the growing Flag race through the
woods, splash in the spring, and disappear for hours while Penny recovers
and farmwork is neglected.