Sounder, the great coon dog, has the neck and shoulders of a bulldog and the melodious bay of a hound. When he trees a coon, his voice rolls through the moonlit night and across the flatlands, louder that any dogs in the whole countryside.
But Sounder cannot save his master the poor black sharecropper driven to steal for his hungry wife and children. Sounder cannot save him from the sheriffs posse, nor can he save him from fate.
For fate pursues them both, master and coon dog, mauling each of them in the cruel, impersonal jaws while the boy who loves the two of them is forced to bear his sorrow like a man, though he is still a child.