Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls

First published: 1961

Type of work: Adventure tale

Themes: Animals, family, and coming-of-age

Time of work: The early twentieth century, c. 1920

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: The Oklahoma Ozarks

Principal Characters:

• Billy Coleman, a young boy, who trains his two coon hounds to be the best hunting dogs in the Ozarks
• Old Dan, his male hound, which is noted for his strength and tenacity
• Little Ann, his female hound, which is noted for her comeliness and intelligence
• Grandpa, his doting grandfather, who is his accomplice in many of his adventures
• Papa, his father, who encourages him in training and hunting the dogs
• Mama, his mother, who is lenient and kind, and allows Billy freedom to roam at will

The Story

Billy Coleman is a boy growing up in the Oklahoma Ozarks—wild, sparsely settled country, a hunter’s paradise. His father works hard at farming to provide for the family, and his mother diligently cares for Billy and his three younger sisters, but neither does much supervision of Billy. He spends his days roaming the out-of-doors, exploring hills and river bottoms, and longing for a pair of coonhounds with which to hunt. The family is too poor to buy the dogs, but so strong is Billy’s passion that he vows to earn the money himself. It takes him two years of hustling, but eventually he acquires the pups.

Billy names his dogs Old Dan and Little Ann, and begins teaching them all the lore he has learned from his years in the woods and any additional information he can pick up from the coon hunters who congregate at Grandpa’s store. As the three spend their nights in search of ringtails, an extraordinary bond of trust and devotion develops among them. The dogs learn to hunt as a team, a beautiful pair of hounds working in precision, and Billy learns to anticipate their movements, to know instinctively what they will do. More important, they learn that they can rely on one another, even to the point of risking death when necessary.

It is inevitable that Billy’s halcyon days cannot last forever, and trouble does come. It is the growing reputation of his dogs’ prowess that precipitates the trouble. Grandpa and Billy are pushed into making a bet with two bullies, Rubin and Rainie Pritchard, that Old Dan and Little Ann can tree a ghost coon. During the subsequent hunt, Rubin is tragically killed. Billy is greatly affected by the death but gains maturity as he gropes with the pain and eventually is able to comfort Grandpa.

The dogs are entered in a championship coon hunt. Billy grooms Little Ann with Grandpa’s dresser set and homemade butter, and she wins a silver cup for best-looking hound at the hunt. Later she and Old Dan tree sufficient coons to win the gold cup and the money that goes with the championship.

The commitment that has grown consistently stronger between Billy and the dogs is ultimately tested when Old Dan is attacked by a mountain lion. Billy and Little Ann rush unhesitatingly to his aid. The lion is killed, but Old Dan is fatally wounded. Little Ann’s wounds are superficial, but she loses her will to live and also dies. Billy is bowed in grief, but his sorrow is mitigated when a red fern springs up between the dogs’ graves, and he recalls the legend that only an angel can plant the seeds of a red fern. That spot where it is planted becomes sacred.

Soon after, the family uses the championship money and the money saved from Billy’s hunting to move out of the Ozarks into town, where the children can attend school. Thus, Old Dan and Little Ann give the family a chance for a new life with broadened opportunities.

Context

Rawls published one other book, Summer of the Monkeys (1976). It, too, is set in the Oklahoma Ozarks and contains much that is similar in plot and characterization to Where the Red Fern Grows. In choosing the Ozarks for the setting of his books, Rawls states that he is writing about his own boyhood. It is the picture he creates of rural life in the early part of the twentieth century that gives Rawls’s work an importance beyond the telling of a good tale. He preserves something of the indigenous flavor of life in that time, at that place.

Through the eyes of Billy Coleman, the reader is permitted a look at the mores, value systems, and social customs that exist within his community. One is made aware of the topography of the land, its still virginal state, the loneliness spawned by sparse settlements, and the lack of social institutions such as schools and churches. Rawls records an obedience to the work ethic so ingrained that Papa is reluctant to leave his work for even a few days to attend the championship coon hunt. Recorded also are the patched overalls, the reverence for one’s dogs, the home-canned huckleberries made into a cobbler, the superstition of the screech owl, the need to go to a hair-cutting to keep one’s hair groomed, and the legend of the red fern.

Perhaps one of the most striking comments on rural life of that day is made by Rawls in the freedom that he gives both his protagonists to roam freely about their woods and river bottoms without undue fear for safety. During hunting season, a period of several months, Billy is permitted to stay out all night, every night. Of interest also to the social scientist is the lack of compunction that Billy feels on cutting a giant, stately tree because his dogs have treed a raccoon among its branches, as well as the glee he and other hunters experience in the repeated slaughter of raccoons.

When Billy makes his first trip to Tahlequah, he is stared at, laughed over, and called a hillbilly, but he cannot imagine why. After all, he is not that different from everyone he knows. The significance of Rawls’s work is not only in how Billy differs from his contemporaries but also in the extent to which Billy’s life contrasts with the reader’s. That the reader can have some sense of the breadth of change is a measure of Rawls’s achievement.