Incident at Hawk's Hill

Incident at Hawk's Hill is a novel by the American writer Allan W. Eckert, published in 1971 and based on an event that is said to have taken place on the Manitoba prairie in 1870.

Ben MacDonald is six years old and does not fit easily into his family or into the farming community around him. He is quiet and drawn to animals rather than people, and when his interest in a badger's den takes him away from home he becomes lost in open country. What follows is a summer spent outside, in which the badger becomes the thing that keeps him alive: it brings him food, gives him shelter and defends him, and the boy survives on what the animal provides and on what he can learn about how it lives. Meanwhile his parents and the neighbours are searching, and the novel follows both the boy's time in the wilderness and the family's efforts to find him.

Eckert writes the story as an account of the natural world rather than as a fable, and the animal that protects the boy is treated seriously as a wild creature with its own reasons.