Month: October 2022

This boy’s father works fixing power lines in mountainous country in Idaho. There’s a forest fire, the men are up there making repairs and find an orphaned puma kitten. Man brings it home and they raise it in the family. At first of course the kitten is cute and playful, but when it gets bigger they can’t keep it in the house. Boy builds a shelter for it in the yard and takes it for walks on a chain, lets it loose to run beside his bicycle in the woods. He loves the young mountain lion Pepper, but when she reaches maturity they realize they can’t keep her. Friends are no longer allowed to come over and play- other parents worry the mountain lion will hurt somebody, even though she’s gentle and really friendly to people. Then an incident with somebody’s dog in town really brings things to a crisis. Town council demands they get rid of the mountain lion- she has to go into a zoo, live in a cage on an uncle’s property far away, or simply be euthanized. The boy can’t bear any of these options, so he runs away with Pepper into the forested mountains, determined to teach her to hunt so she can live free. He’s glad to get out into the wilderness, but then realizes he doesn’t have any idea how to teach a mountain lion to hunt . . .  This was a pretty good story. It actually had me on tenterhooks for a moment near the end. And the pencil illustrations by Ted Lewin are great, very lively and expressive.

Another nice animal story, the kind that would have really appealed to me in as a kid (and I’m glad can still appreciate now). Wild horses are being round up by helicopter in a canyon area of Wyoming. A boy of the Arapahoe tribe who lives nearby with his family, watches from hiding and is appalled at how relentlessly the helicopter chases the terrified horses, many which fall aside broken-winded or collapse from exhaustion. It turns out the helicopter pilot chased the horses at the wrong moment, and people on the ground aren’t there to help corrall the horses (wayyy pre-cell-phone era!) so the boy subtly helps them escape the canyon. He finds a colt lying on the ground, its mother nearby dead. He takes the colt home and tries to raise it, names it Wildwing.

Things go well for a while but then Wildwing becomes listless and unwell. Going back to the wild herd, the boy finds a mare that has recently lost a foal, and manages to get the two to accept each other. He is broken-hearted at leaving his colt with the wild mare, but knows it has the best chance of recovery that way. Through the weeks and months that follow, he often goes into the brush canyons to re-encounter Wildwing and his adopted mother. The colt still recognizes him and being calm, encourages the mare to accept the boy’s presence too. Back home, the boy’s family has difficulties because the father traded their pinto horse for an unreliable car, and they move residences with the change of seasons each year so need good transportation.

While the parents are absent (father off doing who knows what- he seemed unreliable- and mother gone into town to sell some beadwork she made), the boy and his twin sister coax Wildwing and the mare to the house, hoping to tame the mare and have two horses for the family. They run into problems trying to feed the horses (no good grazing nearby) but then an accident on an adjacent road provides them with a windfall of hay and oats (long story short, a truck hauling it crashes, and the men don’t want to bother climbing down into the canyon gorge to retrieve the spilled load). The ending was kind of ambiguous- the family is making progress taming the mare, but then there’s a vague description of a wild buckskin stallion in the future- suggesting that Wildwing was eventually living free? or maybe just that his spirit always was free, I don’t know. It was nice, though.

I liked how the horses were described- their actions felt very real, down to the little things like body language gestures. The people were all interesting- the boy and his sister described as level-headed and relatively calm, with a serene mother and rather irresponsible father. There’s a grandfather in the story too, who refuses to learn or use any English. The others speak a mixture of English and their native language, they switch depending on the situation. The only characters who felt comical were the white men, portrayed as rather foolish and inept, and full of misconceptions about the Arapahoe- which the boy pointed out to them at one point. It felt very well-rounded.

A true-to-life kind of animal story, easy to read in one sitting. Seemed to me like the author knows animal behavior and the arctic region well. It’s about what happens to a young seal when abandoned by his mother at weaning time. After just sitting around wailing for a while, most of the seal pups gather together and travel to another area where fishing is plentiful. But the seal in this story gets left behind, trapped in an ice cave he hid in during a storm. An unexpected encounter with walrus and the Inuit people hunting them (called Eskimos in this older book) frees him from the ice cave, but then he meets other dangers. Has to avoid orcas, a polar bear, and another encounter with mankind. It’s really chance that saves the young seal from all these threats, some happy circumstances and a sudden act of benevolence by the people (who see the coincidental repeat encounters as a sign of something greater at work). In the end, the seal escapes back into the welcoming sea, where he is happy and relieved to finally meet up with the other seal pups. Nice little story with plenty of unexpected turns, depiction of arctic wildlife and their interactions, and a bit about Inuit culture (though I’m not sure how accurate that depiction is- I know the Inuit used skin boats and hunted walrus, the other finer details could be right or wrong).

Lovely little book- my only complaint is exactly the same as the Merlin series– they needed to be longer! It’s about four kittens who are born to a city alley cat, with wings. No explanation why, the mother cat is just as confused as the reader but shrugs it off. She realizes the benefits when one of her kittens flies up in sudden panic to escape a dog. She gently but firmly teaches her kittens, and encourages them to use their wings to fly away and find a better life. So they do- they fly away to the countryside and make a new home in a forest. It’s very different from their old life. Not necessarily easier. They have to find food, are bothered by noisy fighting raccoons, upset the local bird population (who are outraged to meet cats that can fly!) and get seriously frightened by an owl. But then a child spots them in a clearing, and sets out food, hoping to see them again. It looks like the catwings might have a good future with a new, kind-hearted human friend.

Such a sweet story. With beautiful illustrations by S.D. Schindler (they reminded me of Mercer Mayer’s in the fine detail). I’m very disappointed my local library only has the first book of the series. Really want to get my hands on the rest, but I’m looking for the one that published all four books in a single volume. It just feels like I barely read the first few chapters here!

Also sad that my eleven-year-old is probably beyond the age that would appreciate this book, but I’m going to try and get her to read it anway.

Borrowed from the public library.