It starts out simply enough: two children run pell-mell across an open field, one holding a high-flying kite with the line “I wish you more ups than downs.” But on subsequent pages, some of the analogous concepts are confusing or ambiguous. A moving segment of early frontier America.Ī collection of parental wishes for a child. But most important there was Old Yeller, a big ugly yellow cur, whom Travis hated at the start and grew to love and trust and depend on, up to the tragic and dramatic end. And - a fairly shadowy figure- there was his mother, taking her share and more, in the struggle for existence. There was a small brother, violent in protest against Travis as disciplinarian. There was a constant battle against skunks and coons in the corn patch and the melons. There were the cattle that had to be gentled for milking. There were the hogs who ran wild and some of the most exciting parts of the story tell of the roping and branding of the young. Travis is thirteen when his father goes off on the long cattle trail to Abilene, leaving him as man of the house. In Old Yeller the story is told as a boy might share his own experience of growing up - the dialect is no more insistent-possibly less so- than in The Yearling. This was particularly true in Hound-Dog Man, which for some readers was marred by the vernacular. Gipson, in earlier books, has evinced an evocative quality which recaptures for the reader the sounds, the smells, the sights of the region he knows and loves, recaptures too the emotional quality, the moods of his central figure.

A story of a boy and his dog in the Texas hill country ranks high in the annals of boy and dogdom.

Old yeller book pages