ONE COLD NIGHT

...the cloud coyotes howled in the moonlight, and Snow Woman came to tuck us in."" Depicted in Ewart's sweeping watercolors as a heroic robed figure, Snow Woman brushes leaves from trees, stills streams, and frosts fields, prompting turtles, groundhogs, and other creatures to burrow away for the winter--all but Black Bear, who doesn't leave even when she builds a frozen fire of pine cones, setting the northern sky ablaze. At last the white cloud coyotes chase him to his den and--with snow swirling around a cozy cabin as the coyotes climb back into the sky--""Snow Woman tucked us in."" With a brief, nicely cadenced text and smoothly generalized figures set in lyrically evocative landscapes, an imaginative personification of the coming of winter.