Jim Kjelgaard skillfully unfolds the secrets of the forest without trespassing on the authenticity of animal behavior. His stories are alive with a plot yet devoid of fictitious escape into humanized thoughts of animals. The result is a heightening of dramatic sense in the stories of a fawn who grows up in the wild and learns the wisdom of its own species, of a coyote whose maternal instincts never fall in her escape from the zoo with a pup and the long trek over rugged terrain to the den, of a kitten moved beyond fear to attack a rattlesnake. Sam Savitt has added his animal pictures to these fine tales which convey the many paradoxes in the primitive, keenly intelligent world of the wild. Jim Kjolgaard will be sadly missed.