Calvin Brown reports that when his mother asked Faulkner where he got his knowledge about Indians, the writer replied 'Mrs. In using a mound as a key location in the story, however, Faulkner invented an entirely fictional band of Chickasaw Indians living in a nearby settlement 'under government protection.' In reality, nearly all of the Chickasaw in Mississippi had been relocated to Oklahoma a century earlier, and no reservations for those who did not move have ever existed in the state of Mississippi. The story is in some ways a tall tale, but notably, Faulkner makes reference to a real-life curiosity on the Mississippi landscape: Indian mounds, mysterious uprisings of earth whose building, archaeologists have determined, predated the rise of the later Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes. It is comical, firmly in the tradition of southwestern humor both as an oral narrative and in the plot line of the would-be trickster who gets tricked.

The story is told by two narrators: first, an anonymous, articulate narrator who provides some crucial background information before handing off the telling to Ratliff, who tells in a vernacular style how, in trying to play a practical joke on Luke, he himself becomes the victim of another joke. Faulkner transferred his malady to the story's Luke Provine, a shiftless, quick-to-temper drinker. According to Joseph Blotner, while at the hunting lodge owned by General Jim Stone (father of Faulkner's friend and mentor Phil Stone), Faulkner was 'plagued with a familiar ailment, a prolonged bout of hiccups after his continued drinking' that made it difficult for him to eat, drink, or sleep (325).

'A Bear Hunt,' Faulkner's first published hunting story, is sometimes confused with 'The Bear,' published a decade later, but no bear and very little hunting appears in 'A Bear Hunt.' The story is based on a real-life incident Faulkner experienced on a hunting trip near the Tallahatchie River in November, 1933.

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