The bulk of the remaining 200-plus pages focusses on the important manly concerns of trackin’, trappin’, skinnin’, shootin’, fightin’, and rustlin’ up some hearty grub. Haggin’s managers, a “quality woman” visiting from Philadelphia who commits the cardinal sin of valuing Red only as a decorative possession. Haggin” on the wild edge of their wealthy patron’s “carefully nurtured” estate. And Danny and his father live “by the grace of Mr. Danny calls the wolverine that raids his trapline an “Injun devil” with provincial thoughtlessness. The book presents class hierarchy as an unquestionable given. Kjelgaard’s vivid images can stop a reader in his tracks with their precision: “A couple of crows cawed raucously from the top of a beech, and flew on the devil’s business that their kind are always about.”Ĭrows have their place, however, as does all life. The savage, silent, head-swinging bear still roamed the Wintapi, an implacable, hating enemy of all the humans who trod there.

Danny lives in a world were “monster bears” exhibit “customary cunning”: Tellingly, the animals in Danny’s world are heavily anthropomorphized. Like them, Big Red is firmly a chronicle of its time–earnest and epic. The result is an adventure on the scale of Treasure Island or Captains Courageous. I’m no tenderfoot deer hunter, as has to git his game the first day or he don’t git it.” What makes this potential fustiness go down so well is the homely speech of the outdoorsmen who live harmoniously in Kjelgaard’s imaginary wilderness: The first man who had dreamed had dreamed of a dog to hunt birds, and to make Red a varmint dog would almost be betrayal of that man and all the others who had striven to make the breed what it was. Surprising, mostly because Big Red features the kind of stirring, archaic prose that might’ve inspired a young Teddy Roosevelt:Īny mongrel with four legs and the ability to run could hunt varmints. What did surprise me was how quickly the book drew me into the adventure of a seventeen-year-old Danny Pickett and his champion Irish setter. Big Red is the one that sticks in my mind, although when I re-opened it for the first time since the 1960s, I didn’t remember much plot or character detail. I don’t remember how I discovered Jim Kjelgaard, or which of his nearly 50 juvenile books I read first. Similarly I never owned a dog in my youth, but I knew what it was like to be around dogs, to have them underfoot, and making noise, and nosing in the grass for something to eat and then roll in. As a kid I even once qualified for the National Rifle Association’s basic marksmanship certificate (way back when the NRA was primarily a gun safety organization). I didn’t hunt, but I knew the basics of gun ownership. I was raised in a community that considered hunting for food to be as natural as driving a car or tractor. Safe in an armchair, contemplating Nature, red in tooth and claw…

Big Red by Jim Kjelgaard