Scrub Idyl

THE YEARLING -- Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings--Scribner ($2.50).

Although she was born in Washington, D. C., was educated at the University of Wisconsin, worked on newspapers in the North, blue-eyed, 42-year-old Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings is pure Southerner in her literary career. Both her novels (South Moon Under, Golden Apples) and her short stories have dealt with the poor whites who live in the Florida scrub where she and her journalist husband went to live in 1928.

The Yearling tells the story of one year in the life of a towheaded, lively 12-year-old named Jody Baxter. The Baxter clearing is even more remote than that of most crackers, but in his own eyes Jody lives an eventful life. There is no school within reach. His days are spent mostly roaming the game-filled woods, hunting bear and deer with his kindhearted pa and a clan of big, bearded, hell-raising moonshiners and horse traders. Occasionally his pa takes him to visit a hearty old woman who lives in a village on the St. Johns River. He sees a flood, afterward goes hunting where stranded wild animals are thicker than flies. Jody's pal is a pet fawn. He takes it on hunting trips, even sleeps with it when he can get around his fussy, practical ma. The idyl ends when hard scrub reality forces him to kill his fawn because it cannot be kept out of the corn patch.

With its excellent descriptions of Florida scrub landscapes, its skillful use of native vernacular, its tender relation between Jody and his pet fawn, The Yearling is a simply written, picturesque story of boyhood that stands a good chance, when adults have finished with it, of finding a permanent place in adolescent libraries.

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