by Moe Zilla

Created on: May 01, 2010

The book opens with a little girl named Nell scrambling into her uncle's old pickup. "You be careful," warns her grandmother, while the uncle insists she'll be fine. But along the bottom of the page, there's a scene of a second family. A pack of wolves lounges lazily on the side of a green hill - and the littlest one is scratching its ear!

It lends an extra fascination to what's basically a very simple story. Uncle Walter drives them down a gravel road in the August night because they're hoping to hear the calls from a wolf pack. But throughout the story, illustrator Consie Powell provides continuous glimpses of what the wolf pack is doing. She even dedicates the book to "my neighbors - the furry ones, whose songs come to me from beyond Farm Lake and the North Kawishiwi River. Thank you for reminding me to tell your story, too."

Both Powell and author Mary Bevis have a fondness for the wilderness, according to the book's jacket and "spend summers on Farm Lake near Ely, Minnesota, where they exchange howls with the same wolf pack." And Bevis does a good job of describing the adventure these two humans share as they drive together into the night. "Stop! There's a wolf!" the little girl says to her uncle.

"Naw. That's Buck, Ben Jasper's dog."

Uncle Walter takes them to the spot where he'd camped with his father when he was young. They see a white-throated sparrow hopping from branch to branch, and hear its distinctive chirp - "old Sam peabody-peabody-peabody." The little details keep the story engaging, while the pictures offer an amusing counter-story. While the girl with her uncle worries about whether she'll even hear the wolves - for the wolf family, it's just another night in the woods!

The illustrations were created using scratchboard - in which sketches on an inky surface reveal the bright colors underneath. Consie Powell skillfully uses it to create the grassy ground and the grey rocks surrounding the wolf family - and the trees in the nighttime woods where the girl and her uncle are traveling hopefully. The story creates a real tension - the little girl is startled by the sounds of other animals in the night. But besides wolves, there's plenty of other beautiful signs of the natural world around them. At the top of the ridge, Nell catches her breath, because she suddenly sees the clear sky above her is glittering with thousands of stars.

It's a real delight when the illustrations show the wolf family reacting to the howls of the humans far away. They stand up on their hind legs and perk their ears, but they don't make a sound.  ("Nell waited. She searched for the Big Dipper and Polaris, the North Star. And she waited some more.")

And then all of the wolves start howling...

Learn more about this author, Moe Zilla.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.