From BookJive
|
|
| Edition: | Yearling (Paperback) |
| Author: | Wilson Rawls |
| Published: | September 1996 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| ISBN 10: | 0440412676 |
| New: | $2.93 (56) |
| Used: | $0.01 (115) |
| + add to my profile | |
Billy Coleman grew up in the Ozark Mountains on a little farm with his parents and two younger sisters. As a kid, Billy's sole desire was to have a pair of coonhound dogs, but his parents constantly refused, saying that they were extremely short on funds. He asks his parents for a pair of hunting hounds, but since the family was not as wealthy as others, all his father could offer him was a farm collie from next door's farm. He then decided to earn the money himself after finding a magazine with a section that advertises dogs for $25 each. On the bank where they fish, Billy offers a prayer to God to help him get his dogs. After two years of working and selling food, 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 became too excited and walked 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 retrieve his pups, and he happily brings them back home with him. On the journey home, he stops by the fisherman's bank, where he had first said his prayer. Here, he thinks over several possibilities for the dog's names, and after a while of thinking, he decides to call them Old Dan and Little Ann.
When hunting season comes, Billy immediately starts out and practices hunting with his dogs. His dogs rustle up a raccoon, or "coon" for short, and manage to chase it up the tallest tree in the forest, a sycamore. Earlier, Billy had promised his dogs that if they managed to tree the coon, he would get it out of the tree for them. Since the tree was too tall to climb, he sets to work on chopping it down, and even spends the nights there because of his persistence to fulfill his promise. Despite the strenuous effort that he exerted, it still was not enough to completely bring the huge sycamore down. Billy then prays to God, asking for assistance and strength to aid him in his task. After this prayer, a peculiar wave of wind blows the tree down without even rustling the branches of surrounding trees. Billy concludes that the phenomenon was a miracle sent by God, and that He truly was guiding him along the way.
With the intention of honing his dogs' hunting skills, Billy goes out hunting almost every night. That winter, the price of coon skins became high due to a surge in popularity of their fur in the use of coats. Together, he and Old Dan and Little Ann perform several amazing feats hunting coons in the Ozarks and earn local fame.
Not long after earning local reputation, two boys named Rainie and Rubin from the Pritchard family challenge Billy to a coon hunting contest. 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 capture it. They make a bet with him that Old Dan and Little Ann could not manage to tree this coon, but if the dogs did, the brothers promised to never bother Billy again. Naturally, Billy's pride in his dogs led him to take part in the bet. After a lot of clever tricks from the coon, Billy's dogs manage to tree it, but as the Pritchards suggested, the coon disappears. The dogs become bewildered by this and, after a lot of searching, eventually gave up. However, at the last minute, Little Ann catches the scent of the coon in the wind. They were able to corner it in a tree, but Billy chose not to kill such a clever old coon, and let it escape. The Pritchard boys call him a coward for his naive act, but Billy doesn't change his mind. At this moment, the Pritchards' hunting hound, Old Blue, walks up. The Pritchard hound attacks Old Dan while Rubin 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 Pritchard dog was about to die, Rubin grabbed Billy's ax and runs toward Billy's dogs, intending to kill them. Billy screams and pleads to Rubin to leave his dogs alone, but despite his pleas, the Pritchard continues his assault. Rubin then trips and falls, allowing Billy to grab his dogs at the last second. However, the younger Pritchard, Rainie, becomes shocked. Billy realizes that Rubin had fallen on the axe, piercing straight through his stomach. Hesitantly, Billy takes the axe out of Rubin's stomach, blood gushing out as he did so. With one last breath, and a few final words, Rubin's breath slowly left his body.
Several weeks later, Grandpa enters Billy into a championship raccoon hunt, pitting Billy against grown men and the finest hounds in all the country. 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 needed one more coon to win the championship, but since the blizzard was still going on Billy did 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 from the 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. Carrying his two dogs, Billy rushes home and had his mom stitch them up. It wasn't long 'til Old Dan died as a result of blood loss. Mournfully, Billy buried Old Dan the next day, depressed over the loss of one of his prize dogs. Little Ann, too, became severely depressed upon the death of her partner. Her will to live died along with Old Dan, and as a result, she refused to eat, and even starved herself to the point that Billy had to force food down her throat. At the brink of death, Little Ann dragged herself to Old Dan's grave, using every bit of strength she could muster. Billy found her lying dead the next day, and buried her next to the Old Dan's grave.
Not long after that, Billy's family had enough money to move to the city. On the day of their departure, Billy went to visit his dogs' graves, to reminisce over the happy memories they shared one last time. 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 was about to leave the Ozarks, Billy turned to look at the graves of his dogs before their buggy went out of sight, and to the place where their dreams would meet in the end.
