Drifter

The only light that Jeddy sees when he wakens on his board bunk in the one room cabin that he shares with his parents and sister is the dim glow from a single window. Life is simple and often hard for the Proudfoot family, but Jeddy loves the animals that live in hills and deserts that surround their land in Southern California and longs for one of his own.  Not one of his father's hunting dogs, but a friend that he can raise and train, a friend that needs him.

However, Jeddy's father makes a living for his family by killing varmints. He's a hunter by trade and shoots any animal that he sees with an instinct as strong as the hounds who chase it. Animals are meant to be killed ― that's the only view he knows.  He is therefore bewildered by a son who is distressed by the savagery of the hunt and the suffering of the animals that he slaughters. Jeddy would prefer to live without harming anything and he sees his father as a hard and unyielding man ― strict and sometimes cruel.  

It is on a seal hunt with his father and a family friend that Jeddy stumbles upon a seal pup who has drifted away from his colony and is now alone, abandon and vulnerable. In an inexplicable instant, the pup and boy bond.  At long last Jeddy has found the friend he's longed for, and, fighting fiercely against the wishes of his father, he brings the seal pup home.  

Although the story is alight with information about animals, the author's striking insight and warmly humorous observations as well as the excitement and action of a frightening wild boar hunt and a jaguar hunt in Mexico, it is also a story about a father and son, who through hardship and near-tragedy, are awakened to the value of the other's perspective. Drifter was a Newberry Medal nominee in 1974 ― an honor richly deserved.