The Red Fox and Johnny Valentine’s Blue-Speckled Hound
By Richard D. Alexander, paintings by John Megahan, Woodlane Farm Books, Manchester, Michigan, ISBN 0-9712314-2-7.

What happens when a scholar who knows animals and their evolution inside-out, top-to-bottom, from a molecular level to the way they behave in their societies, turns his energies to telling stories about them? The Red Fox is the answer—a yarn based on facts, as the best yarns are, and studded on every page with the author’s knowledge of wild animals and backwoods life, of farming and fiddling, hunting and hounds, and of the people of central Illinois near the Sangamon River, where the author grew up on a cattle farm.

The story, splendidly illustrated by John Megahan, the senior scientific illustrator of the U-M Museum of Zoology, takes place at the turn of the last century. Its heroes are Johnny Valentine, a farm boy and precocious banjo plucker of about 12 years old, a lanky adult fiddler named Tennessee Dowdy, Johnny’s blue tick hound Speckles, and the charismatic and cunning red fox of the story’s title.

The story has a moral valuable for readers young and old, but not a simple one; one can say it is about symbiosis and generosity.

Alexander, professor emeritus of biology, is a world expert on evolutionary theory—to which he has contributed in his research on the acoustical communication and sexual behavior of crickets, katydids and cicadas; on naked mole rats, and horses. He grew up in Illinois and as a boy knew the tale-spinner John Valentine when Valentine was an old man. Alexander raises and trains horses on his Woodlane Farm. For more about Alexander’s horse lore, see http://www.woodlanefarm.com/essays.html.

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