STRANGE COMPANION

One of those good little animal books -- a modestly efficient tale about a young teen-age Canadian boy who survives a wilderness year with the whooping crane he had saved. When David runs away from Kise, his gruff widower father, by hiding aboard a small plane, the pilot, Archie, investigating what seemed to be a dead whooper, crashes in the north country forest. Archie is seriously wounded, but when the pair find an unhatched whooper egg, Archie broods while David, taught woodsmanship by Kise, provides food. The hatched crane, Rusty, imprinted by human parents, follows David in the lonely days and months after Archie's death. Eventually David is reunited with a proud Kise and comes home. Considerable information about whooping cranes is slipped into the narrative as simply and easily as the story is told. Straight, clean family fare.