Appalachia Project: Where the Red Fern Grows, 1961

Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls


This is one sweet book, Appalachian to its core, even though it is set in the Ozarks in Oklahoma. Our hero, Billy, lives in wooded hills above the Illinois River. The woods abound with critters--racoons, squirrels, birds, fish, skunks--and plants like ferns, white oaks, thickets of every description. And there are dogs--specifically two coon hounds, Old Dan and Little Ann. Appalachian people would feel at home there.

Where the Red Fern Grows is about Billy and his dogs. Only a few other characters even have names (Ma, Pa, and Grandpa don't count as names). In fact, the first line should be much better known than it is: "I suppose there's a time in practically ever young boy's [child's] life when he's affected by that wonderful disease of puppy love." And Billy (first person narrator) doesn't mean boy-girl love. He means "the kind that has four small feet and a wiggly tail, and sharp little teeth that can gnaw on a boy's finger."

The first part of the book is about how Billy gets his dogs. The second part of the book is about training, hunting, and competing with the dogs. The third part--get out your kleenexes--is about the sacrifices sometimes entailed by love, including human-human love, dog-human love, and the love of two dogs for each other.

All dog books are filled with pathos and high drama. And us dog lovers are suckers for them. Seeing or reading about a dog being hurt fills me with grief. My dogs have been all about love. They have adored me even though I pretty never much deserved it. To be loved like that is a sacred trust. To violate that trust is a heinous crime. One of the best movies I ever saw is one I will never watch again--Dances With Wolves--because an animal is killed in a way that broke my heart. I can never see that scene again.

Old Dan and Little Ann are the life of this story. Their happiness made me happy. Their frustrations frustrated me. And the coon hunting sequences were terrific. Rawls took me right out into those woods, taught me all about coon hunting just by inviting me along--there were no didactic passages to educate us ignoramuses. I caught on quick to the way the dogs communicated with Billy and he with them. The wily coons led all of us on several merry chases and a few gruesome ones.

Red Fern doesn't pull any punches. Awful things happen. However, the impact is softened by (1) the presence of Billy's parents and grandpa and (2) by Billy's evolving faith in prayer. The book is beautifully Christian, but again, never didactic. As with the hunts, Rawls simply takes us along on Billy's journey. It's quite beautiful. It's the spirituality of the book that makes it all bearable and very, very sweet.

The book makes reference to Appalachian-style stereotypes. Billy runs into the Pritchard kids, who come from a family that is known for its isolation as an extended family and its exaggerated independence. Ma says about them, "I would like to do something to help [them], but I guess there's nothing we can do. There are people like the Pritchards all over the hills. They live in little worlds of their own and are all alone. The don't like to have outsiders interfere." They even have their own private graveyard.

Rawls makes no attempt at all to reproduce any kind of dialect. Still, the book has a voice and it sounds Appalachian. The language is plain and direct. Billy is a heroic narrator and shares his humiliations, triumphs, happiness, and grief. The time with the dogs is a precious idyll in his life, a treasure.

You could imagine Billy's family living next door to the Waltons on Spenser's Mountain and the young couple from Gap Creek could be a distant neighbor. I'm gradually building an Appalachian neighborhood for myself, with a landscape that could easily be set into the hills where I now live. It's tight. It's a community.

Where the Red Fern Grows is, of course, a well-known Disneyesque classic movie. I know I've seen parts of it, but I'm eager now to order up some Netflix of the 1974 and 2003 versions and see what I think. I'm afraid of how sanitized and politically-correctified serious children's fiction can be when filmed. I wish the director of Hunger Games would film this book. It would be so vivid and alive.

This is a wonderful book, a fast read, and has great potential as a read-aloud. It portrays an Appalachian family in a positive light without the need for insulin to process the sweetness. Billy is a great role model as he shares his cowardice and bravery, his rejoicing and grieving. Tears fall down, but my thumbs are up.