BIOGRAPHY OF A DESERT BIGHORN

The wolf, the coyote, the falcon--each has had its publishing season, and the bighorn sheep seems to be the latest endangered species to engage juvenile authors' attention. Not that the bighorn isn't worth the effort--but this pedestrian account, in short flat sentences, of young Beju's feeding, games, flight from man and observations of his elders is hardly worthy of the subject. The only interesting part (and that is due to the intrinsic drama of the material) concerns a butting contest between two males, but Steiner even blows this no-comment description by ending the book with the promise that when Beju grew his horns ""he would challenge all rams until he was king of the desert mountains."" (Presumably this future makes his early adventures more important?) Like Steiner's Biography of a Wolf (KR, 1973) this makes the subject accessible to a very young reader, and Linda Powell's black and white drawings make an agreeable backdrop, but Ester Wier's King of the Mountain (KR, p. 515, J-175), even though it's fiction, leaves you with a much stronger sense of the animal's uniqueness and value.