But he didn’t answer, and his father didn’t wait for him to, rising and crossing the room, across the pelt of the bear which the boy had killed two years ago and the larger one which his father had killed before he has born, to the bookcase beneath the mounted head of the boy’s first buck. It was the room which his father called the office, from which all the plantation business was transacted; in it for the fourteen years of his life he had heard the best of all talking. Major de Spain would be there and sometimes old General Compson, and Walter Ewell and Boon Hoggenbeck and Sam Fathers and Tennie’s Jim, too, because they, too, were hunters, knew the woods and what ran them.
He would hear it, not talking himself but listening— the wilder ness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document of white man fatuous enough to believe he had bought any fragment of it or Indian ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it had been his to convey. It was of the men, not white nor black nor red, but men, hunter with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive, and the dogs and within the wilderness in the ancient and unremitting contest by the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter, the voices quiet and weighty and deliberate for retr
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ospection and recollection and exact remembering, while he squatted in the blazing firelight as Tennie’s Jim squatted, who stirred only to put more wood on the fire and to pass the bottle from one glass to another. Because the bottle was always present, so that after a while it seemed to him that those fierce instant of heart and brain and courage and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled into that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank, drinking it moderately, humbly even, not with the pagan’s base hope of acquiring thereby the virtues of cunning and strength and speed, but in salute to them.
His father returned with the book and sat down again and opened it. “Listen,” he said. He read the five stanzas aloud, his voice quiet and deliberate in the room where there was no fire now because it was already spring. Then he looked up. The boy watched him. “All right,” his father said, “Listen.” He read again, but only the second stanza this time, to the end of it, the last two lines, and closed the book and put it on the table beside him. “She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair,” he said.
  “He’s talking about a girl,” the boy said.
  “He’s had to talk about something,” his father said. Then he said.
  “He was talking about truth. Truth doesn’t change. Truth is one thing. It covers all things which touch the heart – honor and pride and pity and justice and courage and love. Do you see now?”

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