Sweet kid, right? He doesn't care about the money, he just wants to keep on hunting.īilly earns a reputation in his small town for having the best hunting dogs around. Billy sells his raccoon skins at his grandfather's store, but gives all the money to his dad. Seriously, most of this book is Billy in the woods hunting with his dogs. They hunt and hunt and hunt, and then they hunt some more.

The three of them (Billy, Old Dan, and Little Ann) are inseparable. (She's also the runt of the litter, so she's super small.) Little Ann on the other hand is really, really, smart, like almost freakishly smart. He is also, and there is no kind way to say this, a little dumb. The dogs are everything he ever dreamed they would be. After two years of saving up, he finally has enough money to buy a pair of hounds. So Billy takes matters into his own hands. Not super poor, but poor enough that they're not about to run off and buy him a pair of purebred dogs. The problem is that Billy's parents are poor. That old guy from before is now a twelve-year-old boy desperate for a pair of Redbone Coonhounds. We aren't told exactly, but our Wayback Machine tells us it's the 1910-20s. Cue flashback.Īll of a sudden, we're way back when, which is about 50 years earlier. Seeing the hound makes him remember two other hounds from way back when. On his way home from work, the author hears a dogfight between a hound and several other dogs. Well, not our present day, but the author's present day.

Where the red fern grows author