I’ve read it twice as a child and twice as an adult, yet the sense of freshness, wonder and heartfelt
faith shines anew each time I pick up Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. This tale of unshakable friendship between a boy and his dogs is told by young Billy Colman from the Ozarks of Northeastern Oklahoma in the early 20th century. Smitten at age ten with a severe case of “dog-wanting disease” and heart-broken because of his parents’ inability to afford the
hunting hounds he desires, Billy sets out to make his dream come true. Armed only with his determination and faith in God, he scrapes together enough money over two long years to buy his beloved dogs, named
old Dan and
Little Ann. From that point on they become an inseparable threesome, bound together by love and loyalty that proves stronger than
death itself.
Billy’s exuberant accounts of racing through the river bottoms to the music of Old Dan’s and Little Ann’s bawls, hot on the trail of an elusive old
coon, are not solely about adventure. Often faced with dangerous situations and decisions that test his character, you witness with each step a boy slowly becoming a man. Billy determines he must not break a promise he made to his dogs, even if it means attempting the near impossible task of chopping down the biggest sycamore in the bottoms. When Little Ann falls into an icy river and hangs minutes from her death, Billy must execute a plan to save her using only his wits and a prayer. And when a tragic accident befalls Rubin Pritchard during a quest for the mysterious ghost coon, Billy wrestles with whether he should give up hunting altogether.
Caught up in the beauty of the Ozarks, the exhilaration of coon hunting, and his love for Old Dan and Little Ann, Billy is little aware that his parents have dreams of their own. When a chance at winning the championship coon hunt brings success and a small fortune beyond their expectations, it is the answer to the prayers of Billy’s mother, who had long hoped they could afford to move into town where Billy and his sisters could go to school. But in order for that prayer to come to fruition, tragedy must strike first, and through it Billy must learn the hardest lesson of all: finding faith enough to embrace the goodness of providence through his own personal pain.
It is hard to believe that the pages of this beloved story, drawn from the real life experiences of Wilson Rawls’ boyhood days in Scraper, Oklahoma, were at one time consigned to the fireplace by the author himself out of embarrassment over his poor spelling and grammar. Inspired to be a writer after reading Jack London’s Call of the Wild , but unable to continue his education beyond the eighth grade due to poverty and the Great Depression, Rawls sought to hide his broken dreams from his wife Sophie and burned all his writings. Upon discovering what he had done, Sophie persuaded him to rewrite one of his stories, and what he handed her three weeks later was a manuscript of Where the Red Fern Grows . She polished the manuscript and encouraged her husband to get the story published. After circulating for some years in obscurity, it gained tremendous popularity through word-of-mouth among teachers and schoolchildren. Rawls was often invited to schools to share the story of his childhood, and recount the tale of the birth, near death, and resurrection of Where the Red Fern Grows .
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