Big game hunter in Faulkner Country.

Paul Rainey was long dead by the time he made several cameo appearances in Faulkner’s fiction—playing himself, by the way—but if he had been a fictional character, it would have taken Hemingway and Fitzgerald together to cook him up—think the Great Gatsby meets Hemingway’s Great White Hunter. Rainey was born a millionaire (around $20 million, give or take) in 1877, in Ohio, and by the turn of the century, he’d made an international reputation as a sportsman and lady’s man. His African safaris were legendary—he once shot 9 lions in 35 minutes, and he traveled all the way to the Artic with explorer Harry Whitney to return with Silver King, a polar bear he donated to the Bronx Zoo; today there is a zoo gate named in Rainey’s honor. Rainey was as skilled with a camera as he was with a gun, and shot the very first motion pictures of an African safari.

But it was Rainey who was captive, as in captivated, when he visited the area around Cotton Plant, Mississippi. In 1905, he set up a 10,000 acre hunting preserve there, and began hosting the National Fox Club’s annual foxhunt. He built a magnificent lodge, with an ice plant, steam heat, even a dog food oven for his hundreds of hounds; in his perfectly round polo barn, he kept a stable of fifty horses. His parties were fabled affairs, as the hoi polloi of continental society piled into his private rail cars and made the trek to Mississippi for lavish entertainments. Rainey had a luxury hotel built in downtown New Albany to insure his hospitality was truly world-class. Though he owned estates all over the world, most people agreed he loved his Mississippi paradise the best, and considered it his true home.

It was not to last, however; Rainey died on his 43rd birthday on his way with friends to his Nairobi estate. His preserve was dismantled, his hotel eventually burned, and today all that’s left of his glamorous adventure in Mississippi are a few mentions in Faulkner, as in The Reivers when the narrator remembers the by-gone “Mr. Paul Rainey” and “the vast rambling hotel booming then, staffed and elegant, the very air itself suave and murmurous with money, littered with colored ribbons and cluttered with silver cups.”

But don’t feel too sorry for Paul Rainey, because you’re out to bag your own big game ahead, as you hunt down Faulkner’s outsized ancestry in New Albany and Ripley.