Somehow I’d gotten through school without ever reading Wilson Rawl’s Where the Red Fern Grows
My sensitive 13-year-old daughter resisted reading the book till the very last minute, dreading it would be too sad. All she knew was that it was the coming-of-age story of a boy named Billy and his two beloved dogs—dogs who saved the boy’s life but died themselves.
We had quite a surprising discussion about the bittersweet ending. The story ends with the boy and his family leaving their home in the Ozarks to move into town. Billy goes to say goodbye to his dogs and finds a beautiful red fern growing up between the mounds of the dogs’ graves. This was Cherokee country, and everyone knew the old Indian legend of the red fern: Only an angel could plant the seeds of a red fern, the spot where it grew was sacred, and the fern would live forever. Billy knew his dogs were safe in God’s heaven, looked after by angels, and that a part of his life, his childhood, was behind him.
“But the dogs themselves were angels too,” one of the girls in the book group said. She read the passage where Billy’s father says people often talk about a dog’s loyalty to its owner. But his father has a better word for it: love, “the deepest kind of love.”
“The dogs were like animal angels,” someone else said, “guiding a boy through the adventures of adolescence in the Ozarks.”
The adventures of adolescence—the mothers in the book group traded looks. Our own daughters were coming of age. May heavenly angels and earth angels of all kinds guide them as they leave their childhood innocence behind and grow into young women who never forget the legend of the sacred red fern.
