Where the Red Fern Grows

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Where the Red Fern Grows
Author Wilson Rawls
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Children's literature
Publisher Doubleday
Publication date 1961
Media type Hardcover (first edition)
Pages 211
ISBN ISBN 0-440-22814-X

Where the Red Fern Grows is an inspirational 1961 family adventure novel by American author Wilson Rawls about a boy who acquires and trains two Redbone Coonhound hunting dogs. It was made into a popular 1974 film starring Stewart Petersen, James Whitmore and Beverly Garland. The film was remade in 2003 and starred Joseph Ashton, Dabney Coleman, Ned Beatty and Dave Matthews.

[edit] Plot summary

 The plot summary in this article or section is too long or detailed compared to the rest of the article.
Please edit the article to focus on discussing the work rather than merely reiterating the plot.

Billy grew up in the Ozark Mountains on a little farm with his parents and three younger sisters. Billy's sole desire is to have a pair of coonhound dogs. He asks his parents for a pair of hunting hounds, but since the family is poor, all his father can offer him is a farm collie from next door's farm. Billy becomes physically sick for want of the dogs. Then he decides to earn the dogs himself after finding a magazine with a section that advertised dogs for sale. The magazine was discarded by fishermen. On the bank where they fish, Billy offers a prayer to God to help him get his dogs. Billy does odd jobs and sells food and bait to the fishermen to earn money. After two years, he earns enough, and his grandfather orders the dogs. When the paper confirming the purchase comes back, Grandpa tells Billy that someone will bring him to town next week to fetch his pups. However, Billy is too excited and walks to town that very night to fetch his pups from the train station in Tahlequah. After a couple of misadventures in town, Billy manages to get his pups. He carries them home in a gunny sack. On the way home he stops by the fishermen's bank, where he had first said his prayer. He tries to think of names for his dogs, but cannot think of any. Finally, he takes a look around and sees that a fisherman had carved the names Dan and Ann on a nearby tree. Billy decides to name his dogs Old Dan and Little Ann.

Billy realizes that Old Dan is the muscle of the team, since he is larger and more muscular. Little Ann was probably the runt of the litter, but she is a very bright dog. Billy trains his dogs with a coon skin after trapping one in a controversial method. He drags the coon skin along the ground to leave a scent, and he has his dogs follow the scent. He teaches them every trick he has ever heard of.

When hunting season comes, Billy is very excited and immediately starts out. His dogs rustle up a "coon", or raccoon and manage to chase it up the tallest tree in the forest, a sycamore. He knows that if he doesn't get the coon out of the tree his dogs won't trust him any more. He sets to work chopping down the tree. After a couple of days, the tree still hasn't fallen, and he is ready to give up. Billy then prays to God to help him bring down the tree. After this prayer, a strange wind blows the tree down without even rustling the branches of other nearby trees. His dogs get the raccoon and Billy decides that the wind was an act of God.

Billy goes out hunting almost every night. That winter, the price of coon skins is high due to a surge in popularity of their fur in the use of coats. He brings the pelts to his Grandfather's store to be sold. Together, he and Old Dan and Little Ann perform some amazing feats hunting coons in the Ozarks and earn local fame.

After a while, two boys named Rainie and Rubin from the Pritchard family challenge Billy. They claim that in their region there is an old coon who can disappear, and that their blue tick hound has never managed to tree this coon. They make a bet with him that Old Dan and Little Ann could not manage to tree this coon. At first, Billy does not want to bet but Grandpa pushes him into it. Billy meets up with the Pritchard boys a day later to hunt the "ghost" coon. His dogs manage to tree the coon after a lot of clever tricks from the coon, but as the Pritchards promised, the coon disappears. The dogs are bewildered by this and, after a lot of searching, are ready to give up. Billy pays his bet. However, at the last minute, Little Ann catches the scent of the coon on the wind. It turns out that the coon's disappearance act was simple: he walked out to the end of a long branch and dropped down on to a fence post, which turned out to be hollow. Billy does not want to kill such a clever old coon. The Pritchard boys don't understand and call him a coward, but Billy doesn't change his mind. At this moment, the Pritchards' hunting hound walks up. The Pritchard hound attacks Old Dan while the elder Pritchard boy attacks Billy. Billy tells him to stop so they can separate their hounds, but the Pritchards are not worried since their dog is bigger and stronger than Old Dan. However, Little Ann runs in to help Old Dan. When the blue tick hound is about to die, The elder Pritchard then grabs Billy's ax and runs toward them, intending to separate them. He calls to the Pritchards to take care of their dog, but neither of them move. Then Rubin trips, allowing Billy to grab his dogs. The younger Pritchard, Rainie, is shocked. Billy soon realizes Rubin had fallen on the axe, killing him.

Several weeks later, Grandpa enters Billy into a championship raccoon hunt, pitting Billy against grown men and the finest hounds in all the country. Entrants come from Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and other states. Little Ann wins the beauty pageant at this hunt, earning a little silver cup. When they go hunting the first time, the pair of hounds tree three coons, qualifying them for the final round. During the final round, the pair tree one coon before a blizzard comes up. Billy, his father, Grandpa, and the judge lose track of the dogs. Finally, after half the night, they find them circling a tree in a gully. Billy's father chops down the tree and three coons come running out. The dogs dispatch two of them, but the third gets away. They need one more coon to win the championship, but since the blizzard is still going on Billy does not want his dogs to chase the coon for fear of them freezing. However, against his wishes, the dogs chase the coon. Billy and the rest of the company wait out the blizzard in the gully. In the morning, the hunters discover the two dogs covered with ice unceasingly running around a tree. All the hunters help Billy melt the ice off his dogs. Then they watch as the trio take care of the last coon. Billy, Old Dan, and Little Ann win the hunt and receive the championship gold cup as well as a jackpot.

After the championship coon hunt, however, Billy's dogs faced a terrible event. As Billy took his dogs to hunting as usual, they accidentally treed a big animal, of which Billy took to be a bobcat. Soon the trio realized that they had treed a mountain lion. A massive fight broke out, and in the end, Old Dan was fatally injured due to his entrails getting caught up in a bush. Little Ann was severely scratched up, but they weren't fatal injuries. Billy left his ax and lantern at the battlefield, with the mountain lion lay dead. Old Dan died as a result of loss of blood and infection after Billy's Mama cared for him. Billy buried Old Dan the next day. Soon after the death of Old Dan, Little Ann, losing the will to live, refused to eat and dragged herself to Old Dan's grave and died there. Billy found Little Ann, and had to bury her the following day.

A while later, Billy's family had enough money to move to the cities and was getting ready when Billy decided to visit his dogs' graves. Upon arriving at the graves, he saw that a fern had grew between the two mounds. At first he was angered, but he soon realized that the fern was a sacred red fern, rumored to have been planted only by an angel. As the family leave the Ozarks, Billy turned to look at the graves of his dogs one last time before their buggy went out of sight.

[edit] External links