Billy's Coonhounds Essay

In this novel, we follow the journeys of Billy and his coons. He goes on dangerous trips with his coonhounds, and even meets with the ghost coon. Billy enters his coons in an annual coon hunting competition, and the winner depends either if you read the book or watch the movie. Billy’s coonhounds make the ultimate sacrifice to protect Billy and gave their lives for his safety. These two coonhounds will be remembered for their heroic actions. In order to understand the differences and the similarities, we shall start listing the events that occur in the books. As we follow the adventures of Billy he gets his coonhounds, a dream come true! Billy realizes from that day his whole life will be different with the coonhounds. He makes it home pronouncing the arrival of Little Ann and Old Dan, his three sisters start to play with the dogs. Days later the Prichard boys bet that he cannot tree the ghost coon, who they say can supposedly “disappear” Billy accepts the challenge and does tree the coon, The Prichards then want Billy to kill it, Billy refuses and gives Rubin the bet money, but Rubin sees the duo getting under Old blue’s skin. Rubin takes
Billy’s axe and proclaims that he will kill Billy’s dogs, in attempting so, he trips and the axe gets lodged into his stomach, Billy continues hunting with his coonhounds refusing to remember the glimpse of seeing Rubin with an axe in his stomach. He enters the annual coon hunting competition, going against many coonhounds of different sizes and colors. After the disastrous sleet and winter storm, him and his dogs win the silver cup and gold cups and are awarded the prize money, getting home, he gives his cups to his sisters who begged to get it. He then faces an old enemy the so called “devil cat”, this would be Old Dan’s and Little Ann’s greatest sacrifice to Billy. Billy returned home unharmed, but his coonhounds were damaged after the fight, and Dan gave his life to Billy and Billy buries him by the hill side. Little Ann dies from the worst death possible, sadness, she refused to eat and drink so they had to be fed manually, but sadly they died aswell… After a while, the legendary red fern grew in their deathbeds. With this in mind, we can now see what differences are in the movie. Billy saw a man with two coonhounds in the back of his truck passing by, this motivated Billy to save up to get coonhounds of his own. He successfully does so and gets two coonhounds that would be named the rememberable Old Dan and Little Ann. As the shenanigans of the coonhounds continue, Billy wants to enter the coon hunting competition. Sadly Billy didn’t win, but was given the trophy due to his heroic actions. The coonhounds then fight their worst enemy again and like the story, gave their lives for it… Dad buries the dogs and afterwards, a red fern starts to grow. In reality, these two novels may seem like copies of each other, but they have some big differences.
One big one is that Billy won in the book but didn’t in the movie, then we have the sister count, Only two in the movie but three in the book. Billy’s dad buries the dogs instead of Billy doing it himself. In the movie, after the attack of the mountain lion, Old Dan receives major damages Little Ann is unharmed, but in the book both dogs are harmed one way or another. Now onto some similarities. They both include a boy and his two coonhounds treacherous adventures across the Ozarks. They all entered a competition to see who is the best, and had to fight the mountain lion, Billy used all his power to try to keep his dogs safe, but his dogs used all their power to keep him safe, and sacrificed themselves for the greater
good... Finally, because of the book’s more detailed storyline, The book in my opinion is the best of the two. The book drew me closer to the two coonhounds that Billy owned. The characters in the book had more vivid personality. The book is longer, so you connect to characters better in it. At least the book doesn’t skip over important parts, and this is my review of the differences and similarities from Where the Red Fern Grows.