This
is a beautiful book for all ages. Richly illustrated in color, the
engaging story is that of Johnny Valentine -- a boy with an unusual hound
pup and a special friend named Tennessee. Tennessee strides into Big Hollow
through a wispy evening fog, with a black hat stuck down over his sandy-red
hair and a homemade fiddle tucked into a pouch carried on one shoulder. Alongside
him trots his little brown hound, Sol.
But the hero of the story is a certain red fox, who creates his own personal
territory along a river in Big Hollow, not far from the place of his birth.
There he marauds among the local farms, creeping and drifting along the cover
of darkness to steal chickens, avoid the boys of the neighborhood, acquire
a mate, and outrace and outsmart the hounds that the local farmers sometimes
set upon his trail.
Surprising things happen to the fox and the hounds, and to Johnny Valentine
and Tennessee. Yet they arise out of everyday episodes in the life of a country
fox, and the lives of the hounds and people that pursue him and become familiar
with his beauty and agility, his phantom-like wiliness, and his unpredicatbility.
Alexander, Richard. D.
2004. The Red Fox and Johnny Valentine's Blue-Speckled Hound. Woodlane Farm
Books, Michigan. 11" X 8 1/2", hardback, dust cover, 89 pp., 7 chapters,
author's note, reference on red foxes, 31 full-page watercolor paintings by
John Megahan, 36 pencil field sketches of foxes by William D. Berry, one pencil
sketch of a hound by the author, one photograph of fox kits.
Price when ordered
from Woodlane Farm Books, $25.00 including shipping and handling. Please use
check or money order.
Woodlane
Farm Books, 10731 Bethel Church Road, Manchester, Michigan 48158
