Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
We confess: we had the ultimate cheat sheet for this one. During a 1957 lecture to students at the University of Virginia, one student asked Faulkner about the importance of the hunt in "The Bear." Faulkner replied that he believed all of life is a hunt, a pursuit, constantly moving forward and adjusting to the next phase of life. He thought that the alternative is immobility. He described the hunt in "The Bear" as the story of a child's (Isaac's) effort to adjust to the increasing demands of adult life.
Throughout this story, we do see Isaac in the pursuit of adult skills and adult truths about man's relationship to the wilderness. In fact, throughout the novel, Isaac's a man on the move. He hunts literally throughout his life, but we see his pursuit of higher truths as well as his struggles with the meaning of his inheritance and how to deal with it.
Faulkner told the students that he believed that the goal of life was to pursue and overtake, but to have the compassion not to completely destroy what you overtake—kind of a "catch and release" philosophy, he called it. "The pursuit's the thing," he told the students. It's the journey, not the outcome, that's important in life. That's the symbolism of the hunt.