Where the Red Fern Grows

by Wilson Rawls

  My fire had burned down, leaving only a glowing red body of coals. The cave was dark and silent. Chill from the night had crept in. I was on the point of getting up to rebuild my fire, when I heard what had awakened me. At first I thought it was a woman screaming. I listened. My heart began to pound. I could feel the strain all over my body as nerves grew tighter and tighter.

  It came again, closer this time. The high pitch of the scream shattered the silence of the quiet night. The sound seemed to be all around us. It screamed its way into the cave and rang like a blacksmith’s anvil against the rock walls. The blood froze in my veins. I was terrified. Although I had never heard one, I knew what it was. It was the scream of a mountain lion.

  The big cat screamed again. Leaves boiled and stirred where my pups were. In the reflection of the glowing coals, I could see that one was sitting up. It was the boy dog. A leaf had become entangled in the fuzzy hair of a floppy ear. The ear flicked. The leaf dropped.

  Again the hellish scream rang out over the mountains. Leaves flew as my pup left the bed. I jumped up and tried to call him back.

  Reaching the mouth of the cave, he stopped. Raising his small red head high in the air, he bawled his challenge to the devil cat. The bawl must have scared him as much as it had startled me. He came tearing back. The tiny hairs on his back were standing on end.

  My father had told me lions were scared of fire. I started throwing on more wood. I was glad I’d dragged up a good supply while making camp.

  Hearing a noise from the bed, I looked back. The girl pup, hearing the commotion, had gotten up and joined the boy dog. They were sitting side by side with their bodies stiff and rigid. Their beady little eyes bored into the darkness beyond the cave. The moist tips of their little black noses wiggled and twisted as if trying to catch a scent.

  What I saw in my pups gave me courage. My knees quit shaking and my heart stopped pounding.

  I figured the lion had scented my pups. The more I thought about anything harming them, the madder I got. I was ready to die for my dogs.

  Every time the big cat screamed, the boy dog would run to the mouth of the cave and bawl back at him. I started whooping and throwing rocks down the mountainside, hoping to scare the lion away. Through the long hours of the night, I kept this up.

  The lion prowled around us, screaming and growling; first on the right, and then on the left, and above and below. In the wee hours of morning, he gave up and left to stalk other parts of the mountains. I’m sure he thought he didn’t stand a chance against two vicious hounds and a big hunter.

  VI

  AFTER THE TERRIFYING NIGHT, THE BRIGHT MORNING SUN was a welcome sight. I fixed breakfast and soon we were on our way. I tried to get the pups to follow me, so as to lighten my load. They would for a way, and then, sitting down on their rears, they would cry and whimper. Back in the sack they would go, with their heads sticking out of the holes and their long ears flopping. I moved on.

  About midday I entered country I knew. I wasn’t far from home. I dropped down out of the mountains into the bottoms far above the place I had crossed the river on my way to town.

  Staying on the left of the river, I followed its course past several campgrounds, but didn’t stop until I came to the one where I had found the magazine. Here I took the pups out of the sack and sat down in the warm sand.

  As the afternoon wore on, I sat there deep in thought. I was trying to think what I was going to tell my mother and father. I could think of nothing. Finally I decided I would just tell them the truth, and with the help of the new overalls, cloth, and candy, I would weather the storm.

  My pups were having a big time playing. With their little front paws locked around each other, they were growling, rolling, and chewing on one another. They looked so cute, I laughed out loud.

  While I was watching their romping, the thought came, “I haven’t named them.”

  I went over the list of names. For him, I tried “Red,” “Bugle,” “Lead,” name after name as before. For her, I tried “Susie,” “Mabel,” “Queen,” all kinds of girl names. None seemed to fit.

  Still mumbling names over and over, I glanced up. There, carved in the white bark of a sycamore tree, was a large heart. In the center of the heart were two names, “Dan” and “Ann.” The name Dan was a little larger than Ann. It was wide and bold. The scar stood out more. The name Ann was small, neat, and even. I stared unbelieving—for there were my names. They were perfect.

  I walked over and picked up my pups. Looking at him, I said, “Your name is Dan. I’ll call you Old Dan.” Looking at her, I said, “Your name, little girl, is Ann. I’ll call you Little Ann.”

  It was then I realized it was all too perfect. Here in this fishermen’s camp, I had found the magazine and the ad. I looked over at the old sycamore log. There I had asked God to help me get two hound pups. There were the pups, rolling and playing in the warm sand. I thought of the old K. C. Baking Powder can, and the fishermen. How freely they had given their nickels and dimes.

  I looked up again to the names carved in the tree. Yes, it was all there like a large puzzle. Piece by piece, each fit perfectly until the puzzle was complete. It could not have happened without the help of an unseen power.

  I stayed at the campground until dark. I knew I had to go home but I put it off as long as I could. The crying of the pups, telling me they were hungry, made up my mind for me. I knew the time had come for me to face my mother and father.

  I sacked up my dogs and waded the river. As I came out of the bottoms, I could see the lamplight glow from the windows of our home. One of the small yellow squares darkened for an instant. Someone had walked across the floor. I wondered who it was. I heard Daisy, our milk cow, moo. I was thinking so hard of what I would say, it startled me for a second.

  Reaching the gate to our house, I stopped. I had never thought our home very pretty, but that night it looked different. It looked clean and neat and peaceful, nestled there in the foothills of the Ozarks. Yes, on that night I was proud of our home.

  My bare feet made no noise as I crossed the porch. With my free hand, I reached and pulled the leather that worked the latch. Slowly the door swung inward.

  I couldn’t see my father or sisters. They were too far to the right of me, but my mother was directly in front of the door, sitting in her old cane-bottom rocker, knitting.

  She looked up. I saw all the worry and grief leave her eyes. Her head bowed down. The knitting in her hands came up to cover her face. I stepped inside the room. I wanted to run to her and comfort her and tell her how sorry I was for all the worry and grief I had caused her.

  The booming voice of my father shook me from my trance.

  He said, “Well, what have you got there?”

  Laughing, he got up from his chair and came over to me. He reached and took the sack from my shoulder.

  “When we started looking for you,” he said, “I went to the store and your grandpa told me all about it. It wasn’t too hard to figure out what you had done, but you should have told us.”

  I ran to my mother and, dropping to my knees, I buried my face in her lap.

  As Mama patted my head, I heard her say in a quavering voice, “Oh, why didn’t you tell us? Why?”

  I couldn’t answer.

  Between sobs, I heard the squeals of delight from my sisters as they fondled my pups.

  I heard my father say, “What’s this other stuff you’ve got?”

  Without raising my head from my mother’s lap, in a choking voice I said, “One is for you, one is for Mama, and the other is for the girls.”

  I heard the snapping of string and the rattle of paper. The oh’s and ah’s from my sisters were wonderful to hear.

  Papa came over to Mama. Laying the cloth on the arm of her chair, he said, “Well, you’ve been wanting a new dress. Here is enough cloth to make half a dozen dresses.”

  Realizing that everything was forgiven, I stood up and dried my eyes. Papa was pleased with his new overalls. My sis
ters forgot the pups for the candy. The light that was shining from my mother’s eyes, as she fingered the cheap cotton cloth, was something I will never forget.

  Mama warmed some milk for the pups. They drank until their little tummies were tight and round.

  As I ate, Papa sat down at the table and started talking man-talk to me. He asked, “How are things in town?”

  I told him it was boiling with people. The wagon yard was full of wagons and teams.

  He asked if I had seen anyone I knew.

  I told him I hadn’t, but the Stationmaster had asked about him.

  He asked me where I had spent the night.

  I told him about the cave in the Sparrow Hawk Mountains.

  He said that must have been the one called “Robber’s Cave.”

  My youngest sister piped up, “Did you stay all night with some robbers?”

  My oldest sister said, “Silly, that was a long time ago. There aren’t any robbers there now.”

  The other one put her nickel’s worth in, “Weren’t you scared?”

  “No,” I said, “I wasn’t scared of staying in the cave, but I heard a mountain lion scream and it scared me half to death.”

  “Aw, they won’t bother you,” Papa said. “You had a fire, didn’t you?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  He said, “They’ll never bother you unless they are wounded or cornered, but if they are, you had better look out.”

  Papa asked me how I liked town.

  I said I didn’t like it at all, and wouldn’t live there even if they gave it to me.

  With a querying look on his face, he said, “I’m afraid I don’t understand. I thought you always wanted to go to town.”

  “I did,” I said, “but I don’t any more. I don’t like the people there and couldn’t understand them.”

  “What was wrong with them?” he asked.

  I told him how they had stared at me, and had even laughed and made fun of me.

  He said, “Aw, I don’t think they were making fun of you, were they?”

  “Yes, they were,” I said, “and to beat it all, the boys jumped on me and knocked me down in the dirt. If it hadn’t been for the marshal, I would have taken a beating.”

  Papa said, “So you met the marshal. What did you think of him?”

  I told him he was a nice man. He had bought me a bottle of soda pop.

  At the mention of soda pop, the blue eyes of my sisters opened wide. They started firing questions at me, wanting to know what color it was, and what it tasted like. I told them it was strawberry and it bubbled and tickled when I drank it, and it made me burp.

  The eager questions of my three little sisters had had an effect on my father and mother.

  Papa said, “Billy, I don’t want you to feel badly about the people in town. I don’t think they were poking fun at you, anyway not like you think they were.”

  “Maybe they weren’t,” I said, “but I still don’t want to ever live in town. It’s too crowded and you couldn’t get a breath of fresh air.”

  In a sober voice my father said, “Some day you may have to live in town. Your mother and I don’t intend to live in these hills all our lives. It’s no place to raise a family. A man’s children should have an education. They should get out and see the world and meet people.”

  “I don’t see why we have to move to town to get an education,” I said. “Hasn’t Mama taught us how to read and write?”

  “There’s more to an education than just reading and writing,” Papa said. “Much more.”

  I asked him when he thought we’d be moving to town.

  “Well, it’ll be some time yet,” he said. “We don’t have the money now, but I’m hoping some day we will.”

  From the stove where she was heating salt water for my feet, Mama said in a low voice, “I’ll pray every day and night for that day to come. I don’t want you children to grow up without an education, not even knowing what a bottle of soda pop is, or ever seeing the inside of a schoolhouse. I don’t think I could stand that. I’ll just keep praying and some day the good Lord may answer my prayer.”

  I told my mother I had seen the schoolhouse in town. Again I had to answer a thousand questions for my sisters. I told them it was made of red brick and was bigger than Grandpa’s store, a lot bigger. There must have been at least a thousand kids going to school there.

  I told all about the teeter-totters, the swings made out of log chains, the funny-looking pipe that ran up the side of the building, and how I had climbed up in it and slid out like the other kids. I didn’t tell them how I came out.

  “I think that was a fire escape,” Papa said.

  “Fire escape!” I said. “It looked like a slide to me.”

  “Did you notice where it made that bend up at the top?” he asked.

  I nodded my head.

  “Well, inside the school there’s a door,” he said. “If the school gets on fire, they open the door. The children jump in the pipe and slide out to safety.”

  “Boy, that’s a keen way of getting out of a fire,” I said.

  “Well, it’s getting late,” Papa said. “We’ll talk about this some other time. We’d better get to bed as we have a lot of work to do tomorrow.”

  My pups were put in the corncrib for the night. I covered them with shucks and kissed them good night.

  The next day was a busy one for me. With the hampering help of my sisters I made the little doghouse.

  Papa cut the ends off his check lines and gave them to me for collars. With painstaking care, deep in the tough leather I scratched the name “Old Dan” on one and “Little Ann” on the other. With a nail and a rock two holes were punched in each end of the straps. I put them around their small necks and laced the ends together with bailing wire.

  That evening I had a talk with my mother. I told her about praying for the two pups, about the magazine and the plans I had made. I told her how hard I had tried to find names for them and how strange it was finding them carved in the bark of a sycamore tree.

  With a smile on her face, she asked, “Do you believe God heard your prayer and helped you?”

  “Yes, Mama,” I said. “I know He did and I’ll always be thankful.”

  VII

  IT SEEMS THAT THE WORRIES AND WANTS OF A YOUNG BOY never cease. Now that I had my pups another obstacle had cropped up. This one looked absolutely impossible. I had to have a coonskin so I could train them.

  With my three little traps and a bulldogged determination, I set out to trap Mister Ringtail. For three solid weeks I practically lived on the river. I tried every trick I knew. It was no use. I just couldn’t catch the wiley old coons.

  In desperation I went to my grandfather. He smiled as he listened to my tale of woe. “Well, we’ll have to do something about that,” he said. “To train those dogs right, you’ll need that coon hide, that’s for sure. Now you watch the store while I go over to my tool shed. I’ll be right back.”

  After what seemed like an eternity I saw him coming. He was carrying a brace and bit, that was all.

  With a mischievous little smile on his face, he said, “You wouldn’t think a fellow could catch a coon with this brace and bit, would you?”

  I thought he was kidding me and it made me feel bad. “Why, Grandpa,” I said, “you couldn’t catch a coon in a jillion years with that thing. You just don’t have any idea how smart they are.”

  “Yes, you can,” he said. “You bet your boots you can. Why, when I was a boy I caught coons on top of coons with one of these things.”

  I saw Grandpa was serious and I got interested.

  He laid the brace down on the counter, picked up a small paper sack, and filled it about half-full of horseshoe nails.

  “Now you do everything exactly as I tell you,” he said, “and you’ll catch that coon.”

  “Yes, sir, Grandpa,” I said, “I will. I’ll do anything to catch one of them.”

  “Now the first thing you’ll need is some bright objects,
” he said. “The best thing is bright shiny tin. Cut out some little round pieces, a little smaller than this bit. Do you understand?”

  I nodded my head.

  “Now,” he said, “you go down along the river where there are a lot of coon tracks. Find a good solid log close by and bore a hole down about six inches. Drop one of the bright pieces of tin down in the hole, and be sure it’s laying right on the bottom.”

  I was all ears. I didn’t want to miss one word my grandfather said. Now and then I would glance at him to see if he was kidding me.

  In a serious voice, he went on talking. “Now pay close attention,” he said, “because this is the main part of the trap.”

  With eyes as big as a hoot owl’s, I looked and listened.

  He took four of the horseshoe nails from the sack. With the thumb and forefinger of his left hand he made a small “o” about the size of the bit, which was an inch and half in diameter.

  “Now, we’ll say this is the hole you bored in the log,” he said. “About an inch apart, drive these nails in on a slant opposite each other.”

  Holding one of the nails in his right hand, he showed me the right angle.

  “The ends of the nails will enter the hole about halfway between the top and the piece of tin,” he continued. “Leave an opening between the sharp points big enough for a coon to get his paw through.”

  He asked me if I understood.

  Again I nodded my head and moved a little closer to him.

  “How is that going to catch a coon, Grandpa?” I asked.

  “It’ll catch him all right,” he said, “and it won’t fail. You see a coon is a curious little animal. Anything that is bright and shiny attracts him. He will reach in and pick it up. When his paw closes on the bright object it balls up, and when he starts to pull it from the hole, the sharp ends of the nails will gouge into his paw and he’s caught.”

  He looked over at me.

  “Well, what do you think of it?” he asked.

  I closed my eyes and in my mind I could see the funnel-like entrance of the hole, and the sharp slanting points of the nails. I could see the coon reaching in for the shiny piece of metal. Naturally his paw would be much larger when closed than it was when he reached in. It would be impossible for it to pass the sharp nails.