credible novels in which the harsh lives of animals in the wild are depicted with a
ferocious attention to detail. White Fang (1905) and The Call of the Wild (1903) both have
wolf heroes. White Fang describes a Canadian wolf’s life in a way which readers can
appreciate but not feel is a parallel with their own lives. Margaret Blount, who calls
White Fang ‘to me the most outstanding dog book of all’ has said of its power:
what gives the book a different sort of drama, changing it from a brilliant animal
story into a psychological study of great power, almost a case history, is the
meticulous detailing of the way in which circumstances mould character—in this
instance turning a natural young animal into an outcast and an enemy of every
creature that walked, ran, or flew. White Fang, like a human child, has parents,
ancestry, cubhood and youth; forces work on him inevitably to alienate him from
his own kind and turn him into the ferocious killer that he later becomes. He is
only redeemed by the sharp intelligence that enables him to survive, which is, at
the end, recognised by Weedon Scott, the human who loves and tames him.
Blount 1974:254–255Other stories in this vein have shown animals in real life situations. Henry Williamson’s
Tarka the Otter (1927), although not written for children, was soon adopted by them
while Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey (1960) shows two dogs and a cat travelling
four hundred miles to reach their Canadian home.
Indeed, the USA and Canada seem to be have been pre-eminent in producing this type
of animal story in the years between the two world wars, having been led by the
Canadian founder of the Woodcraft Movement, Ernest Thompson Seton, author of Wild
Animals I have Known (1900). Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling (1938) and Mary
O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka (1941) used the affection felt by children towards these
animals to show the difficulty of their family relationships. Dhan Gopal Mukerji, an
Indian writer who lived in the USA, produced a number of realistic animal stories of
which, Gay-Neck, the story of a Pigeon (1927), won the Newbery Medal. One of the most
famous animal books of this period is now mainly known through its adaptation as a
film by Walt Disney, Felix Salten’s Bambi (1928). In this story of the life and death of a
deer, the animals in the forest live realistic lives but talk to each other with the morality
of a respectable society. However, the author does capture the brevity and tensions of
animal life.
While this type of writing was produced in Britain, as exemplified by Sir John
Fortescue’s The Story of a Red-Deer (1897), more often the animals became
anthropomorphised. One important example is Alison Uttley’s series of books about
Little Grey Rabbit, which began with The Squirrel, the Hare and the Little Grey Rabbit
(1929) and concluded more than thirty books later with Hare and the Rainbow (1975),
published a year before the writer’s death. Uttley always jealously asserted that her
contribution was more important than that of the books’ first artist, Margaret Tempest,
but it is the illustrations which are the most distinctive aspect of the books. Little Grey
Rabbit is shown in a neat dress, keeping house most successfully for boastful Hare and
vain Squirrel, all three living in cosy domesticity. However, Alison Uttley also manages to
squeeze in a few pointers about country lore, as she does in her other series of animal
286 ANIMAL STORIES