Where the Red Fern Grows

Where the Red Fern Grows

Author	Wilson Rawls
Language	English
Genre	Children's english
Publisher	Doubleday
Publication date	1961
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	245
ISBN	ISBN 0-440-22814-X

Where the Red Fern Grows is a children's novel written 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.

Plot summary

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, but his parents tell him "no". 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 advertises dogs for sale for $25 each. The magazine was discarded by fishermen that were sitting on a log and later left. 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 by car 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 chooses the names Old Dan and Little Ann.

Billy realizes that Old Dan is the muscle of the team, since trick he has ever heard of, his grandfather helped him learn new tricks to teach his dogs.

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 anymore, because he promised them, if they treed it, he would get him out of the tree. 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 to a coon hunting contest, but the Pritchards are always up to no good. They claim that in their region there is an old "ghost" coon who can disappear, and that their blue tick hound Old Blue has never managed to catch and kill this coon. They make a bet with him that Old Dan and Little Ann could not manage to tree this coon. 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. 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, or he would tell his grandfather and 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 and falls, allowing Billy to grab his dogs. The younger Pritchard, Rainie, is shocked. Billy soon realizes Rubin had fallen on the axe, killing him. Then Rubin asked Billy to take the axe out of his stomach. Blood gushes out and at last a blood bubble comes out of his mouth and he dies.

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 treed one coon before a blizzard comes up. Billy, his father, Grandpa, and the judge lost track of the dogs when Grandpa injured his ankle and couldn't walk. Finally, after half the night, they found them circling a tree in a gully. Billy's father chopped down the tree and three coons came running out. The dogs dispatched two of them, but the third got 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. Billy panics because he thought that his dogs had at first, frozen to death. 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 hunting as usual, they accidentally treed a big animal, a mountain lion, which Billy took to be a bobcat. A massive fight broke out, during which Old Dan was mortally wounded while heroically protecting Billy. 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. Billy rushed home and had his mom stich up his two dogs. Later, 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. After the death of Old Dan, and because Old Dan and Little Ann did everything together, she though that there was no reason to live any longer and she wanted to die with him. Billy's sisters made him promise that Little Ann was fine and would live. Only, in the end, Billy broke his promise. So, soon after the death of Old Dan, Little Ann, losing the will to live, refused to eat,starved herself, so Billy even had to force food down her throat. Tragically, Little Ann drags herself to Old Dan's grave, lays down and dies 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 dog's graves. Upon arriving at the graves, he saw that a fern had grown between the two mounds. He 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, and to the place where their dreams would meet in the end.

External links

• Where the Red Fern Grows (1974) at IMDb
• Where the Red Fern Grows (2003) at IMDb