I’m looking for a book that I read as a young boy but whose name now eludes me. I have no recollection of the title but can provide some detail regarding the story and the cover art (at least the version I had).
The story is about a young boy who moves with his family (father and mother) from a city to a country farm/ranch, despite his initial misgivings. One of the first thing he experiences is a hunt for a mountain lion which has been killing livestock in the area. He sees a mother mountain lion killed and then two cubs thrown to a pack of dogs. Later, he finds a female, runt cub in the mountain lions’ cave (she was too weak to come out and, therefore, escaped notice). He takes her home and secretly raises her. I am fairly certain that he calls her “Beauty” but I am not 100% certain. The book continues with the boy raising the cub to young adulthood, including teaching her how to hunt. Near the end of the book, the father is injured and the mother is somehow incapacitated so the boy (and his secret mountain lion companion) have to walk several miles to town to get a doctor/medicine. Finally, the boy needs to release the mountain lion back into the wild. The book ends with their separation.
I believe the book was published by Scholastic Reader and would have been published sometime in the 1970’s (I think). The cover has artwork that shows the young boy crouching up on a rock to feed or pet the mountain lion who is standing on the top of the rock.
Sounds like Cougar by Virginia Frances Voight. Here’s the description from WorldCAt: “A sixteen-year-old boy rescues an orphaned puma kitten, helps his grandfather turn their unused farm into a wildlife refuge, makes a difficult decision to put the cat into a roadside zoo rather than let it roam free to be shot by a vicious neighboring poacher, and then decides he must teach his pet to live in the wilderness.”
Not this book. No preserve involved…
This is The Wild Orphan by Robert Froman, 1972. Very sensitive. The family had moved into the wilderness of Idaho because the father had been accused – and acquitted – of murder, but too many people in the neighborhood had refused to accept the verdict and were making the teen boy miserable – as well as his asthmatic mother. The boy also raises an orphaned skunk, which comes in handy later. Froman was the author of 30-plus books from 1953 to 1977, mostly nonfiction science books. The pencil drawings are by Mort Kunstler, known for paintings of the Civil War, the cover of Bianca Bradbury’s Two on an Island, and some artwork for MAD Magazine.
That’s it …The Wild Orphan, specifically. Had forgotten about the skunk ,,, many thanks for both replies.
wow – I’ve been looking for this book (The Wild One) and randomly typed in YA, cougar, boy raising and led me to this site!
Was it called the secret lion? Was the cover kind of sketched or drawn with charcoal? I thought it was more like the 50’s or 60’s. I’ve been searching for this book too!
Book I am thinking of is titled, The Mountain Lion written by Robert Murphy, and published in 1969.
It’s definitely the Wild Orphan. I named one of my dogs Lord Love It, after the skunk he raised too.