Eleven-year-old Marty Preston loves to spend time up in the hills behind his home near Friendly, West Virginia. Sometimes he takes his .22 rifle to see what he can shoot, like some cans lined up on a rail fence. Other times he goes up early in the morning just to sit and watch the fox and deer. But one summer Sunday, Marty comes across something different on the road just past the old Shiloh schoolhouses -- a young beagle -- and the trouble begins.
What do you do when a dog you suspect is being mistreated runs away and comes to you? When it is someone else's dog? When the man who owns him has a gun? This is Marty's problem, and he finds it is one he has to face alone. When his solution gets too big for him to handle, things become more frightening still. Marty puts his courage on the line, and discovers in the process that it is not always easy to separate right from wrong. Sometimes, however, you do almost anything to save a dog.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Phyllis Reynolds Naylor met the dog who is Shiloh in this story during a visit to West Virginia. "It was the saddest dog I ever saw," she says, and for weeks after returning home, she could not get it out of her mind. And so she did what she always does when a problem haunts her-works it out in a book. "Like a patchwork quilt," says Mrs. Naylor, "a novel is made up of things that have happened to me and things I have heard or read about, all mixed up with imaginings." The real story has a happy ending, however. Friends in West Virginia wrote that they found the dog she had seen near the little community of Shiloh, took her in and named her Clover.
Mrs. Naylor is the author of over 60 books, including Alice in Rapture, Sort Of; Reluctantly Alice; Beetles, Lightly Toasted, One of the Third Grade Thonkers, and Bernie and the Bessledorf Ghost. She and her husband, Rex, live in Bethesda, Maryland, and have two grown sons, Jeff and Michael.
