The yearling summary By Tim Blood LAC novel project 11/22/16 Ms. Nitti
Jody Baxter is growing up on a little family farm in the woods of Florida, right after the Civil War. (Spoiler Alert: The North won!) His Ma and Pa, Penny and Ora Baxter, do their best to scratch a living from the wilderness, but something's always going wrong—like when Old Slew foot, a huge, freakishly intelligent bear, kills the pig they were counting on for meat in the winter.
They don't catch him (duh, he's freakishly intelligent), but they do come back with an awesome story to tell their closest neighbors, the Foresters. Jody spends the night at their place with his friend Fodder-wing, and thinks it's just great fun when they all end up partying naked in the living room together in the middle of the night. (What? Don't you do that when you…show more content… The Foresters show up just in time—and drunk as skunks—to help carry the carcass home. Then they all head out to the party in town. When Elm finds out that Twin has married Oliver, he, again, does what any man would do—burns Grandma Hutto's house down, on Christmas Day. Like you do.
Home again, things settle down until Penny hurts himself badly doing the planting. Plus, Flag is growing and getting into more and more trouble, trampling crops and knocking over food containers. Man, fawns these days! When he eats his way through the family's entire corn crop—twice—Pa has had enough, and tells Jody to shoot him. Wait, seriously? Yep. And when Jody just can't do it, his Ma tries her hand, only to end up badly wounding poor Flag. Finally, Jody puts him out of his misery and runs away from home.
For days, he wanders through the forest, and then down the river, starving and practically delirious. Finally, some sailors find him, feed him, and send him on his way home. When he gets there, he and his Pa have a chat about how cruel life is, and Jody tells him that now that he's proven
