The Tale of Rescue
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A family—a mother, a father, and their ten-year-old son—have come all the way from Florida to the Appalachian foothills to experience the wonder of a snowy weekend. At a nearby farm, a cattle dog is working, as she does every day, driving her forty head of cattle from pasture to corral and back again. And then, suddenly, a blizzard descends. The family is trapped outside, disoriented in the whiteout. They are panicked, exhausted, freezing, and stranded in waist-deep drifts. From off in the distance, the cattle dog has heard their faint, snow-drowned cries. Her inexhaustible attention turns to saving them. This stirring tale is both a compelling story of survival and a meditation on the tremendous will of man's best friend.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rosen has many dog-themed titles to his credit The Company of Dogs and The Hound Dog's Haiku, among others and in this brief tale, he focuses on the heroic effort of one Australian cattle dog to help a family caught in a whiteout snowstorm. The story is told without proper names or deep characterization; readers move through the dramatic action and poetic language as if privy to someone else's dream or recreated memory. The urgent pace of the cattle dog's rescue attempt ("She struggled forward and onward, springing up and onto the snow, sinking down, and leaping again, ignoring the exhaustion and pain, because everything, absolutely everything depended on her") is coupled with striking poetic language during quieter moments: "their overlapping parallel tracks left an empty musical staff on the blank pages of the smooth fields. Later, they returned on foot and their boot prints added the notes." Fellows's watercolor illustrations add an ephemeral quality to the fleeting story, helping create the distant but satisfying tone of this lovely prose-poem adventure. Ages 10 up.
