Isaac "Ike" McCaslin Timeline and Summary

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• Isaac is born to Theophilus and Sophonsiba McCaslin, the reluctant groom in his sixties and his eager bride.
• They both die when Isaac's young, and he's raised by his sixteen-year-older second cousin McCaslin "Cass" Edmonds.
• When he turns eleven, he hunts his first buck, and is anointed with its blood by Sam Fathers, who's a spiritual mentor to Isaac. This is his initiation into manhood, sort of.
• Isaac also sees the spirit of the wilderness in the form of a giant buck and understands that he is to respect it while hunting.
• At sixteen, he participates in the hunt of a large, legendary bear, Old Ben. The bear gets killed, and Sam also dies a few days later.
• Major de Spain, on whose land they have been hunting, is sad and decides to sell the land to a timber logging company. It's the end of an era for Isaac and the other hunters.
• Isaac goes hunting by himself a couple of years later, and sees signs of the destruction of the forest by the logging company.
• He reflects on the idea of "progress" and the destruction of the environment.
• During those years, Isaac's been sneaking into the commissary of his family's plantation and reading the detailed records his ancestors have kept about their slaves.
• He finds out about his grandfather's incestuous relationship with his slave daughter.
• Thinking about the legacy of slavery and his own family's role in this legacy, Isaac reaches the conclusion that he must relinquish his inheritance, the family plantation.
• When Isaac turns twenty-one, he declares to his second cousin McCaslin his intention to give him his inheritance.
• Isaac moves to a log cabin in town and marries.
• His wife hopes that he will reclaim the plantation. When he tells her he won't, she says they'll never ever have sex again and that he should forget about having children. His wife dies.
• Must be the drafts in the log cabin.
• Isaac still goes hunting every year, even as an old man, but the wilderness has been decimated.
• One year in his old age, he goes hunting with Cass' grandson Roth. He finds that Roth has a son from an African American woman who turns out to be a descendant of Isaac's grandfather's illegitimate son Turl.
• Incest, again—repeating the original incest of five generations ago.
• Isaac once again reflects on the relationship between the races in his family.
• He thinks that society won't be ready to accept race-mixing for another thousand years, but that the ultimate revenge for slavery will be the total mixing of the races.