She was very young and, even allowing for the ordeal of her hunger, as slim as a sapling. He padded round her, seeing her for the first time in the light of day. If she did not drink soon and had not done so by the time the sun was high, she would surely die. It was time to explore the crater again, to discover where, if at all, there was hope of escape some way or means by which he could reach the outcrop and, more importantly, some way he could find to drag the vixen with him to water.

Chalon, a starving dog-fox trying to survive in the almost-lifeless wasteland a hundred seasons after the Great Death, tumbles into an arid blast crater where he discovers a dying white vixen:Ĭhalon’s hindlegs pushed at the ground and he eased his body away from her. In the classic tradition of “Watership Down” and “The Incredible Journey”, the American paperback is blurbed. Brian - and Dan, Jack and Luther - live in its beautiful, medieval market town, Shrewsbury.Ī mystical adventure, an enchanting love story. It is fine pastoral country with hills and woodland, agriculture and dairying. According to the London-based Black Horse Western online newsletter in 2007,īrian Parvin, who writes his westerns as Dan Claymaker, Jack Reason and Luther Chance, hails from Shropshire, a county in the west of the English Midlands, bordering on Wales. Most information about the author mentions The Singing Tree only in passing as a book that he wrote before specializing in Western novels in 1992 ( Buried Guns, Trail-Scarred, Shoot to Live, The Gun Master, and forty-four others).

This was not bad for a novel that was unknown in most American public libraries and was only briefly available from an obscure American paperback publisher. It is mostly forgotten today, but when The Singing Tree was published in England in the mid-Eighties, especially in its American paperback edition as The White Fox, early Furry fans told each other, “You’ve got to read this!” When the first Furry specialty publishers emerged at the end of the 1990s, some of the novel’s diehard fans urged that they try to bring out a new edition of The White Fox. Your rating: None Average: 4.3 ( 3 votes)

The white fox by Brian Parvin