When Sounder chases after the Sheriff's deputies he is shot and he crawls away, seemingly to die. For weeks the boy thinks that he has lost both his father and his dog, but then Sounder comes back, lame and missing an ear. The boy continues to search for his father, until a few years later the father returns home, disabled from a quarry accident.
William H. Armstrong (1911 - 1999) was an American children's author and educator, best known for his 1969 novel Sounder, which won the Newbery Medal.