Ten-year-old Jonathan is lonely, waiting for his mother and little sister to join him and his father, the new keeper at the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage, but no lonelier than the three-year-old brown bear whose mother has abandoned him. They connect when the bear, wounded and desperately searching for food, runs blindly into town, visits Jonathan’s back deck, and then tunnels into the zoo where he kills a goose, the boy’s favorite. If he can’t be captured in the zoo, a ranger will kill him as a nuisance bear. Does he deserve that? Once again, Bauer asks her readers to think about our responsibilities for others’ lives. Basing her story on an actual incident, Bauer intertwines the two stories, emphasizing the bear’s wildness. She weaves in facts about brown bears without interrupting the flow of the narrative. She does the same thing with the fact that Jonathan’s sister, the only one who really appreciates his empathy with animals, uses a wheel chair to get around. A charming, deceptively simple story with special appeal for animal lovers. (Fiction. 8-11)
