Wolf Watch
PreSchool-Grade 2.  For those budding young naturalists who relish information on wild animals, here is a treasure of a book. In short, carefully worded, poetic quatrains, Winters accurately follows four wolf pups from the night of their birth through their first outing from the den. She introduces the habits of the pack: howling at the pups' birth; hunting and delivering food to mother and babies; gathering to welcome the newest family members on their first venture out. She also presents the enemy?a golden eagle?that, sensing the birth, waits for a chance to prey upon one of the defenseless pups. Regan's realistic oil paintings perfectly capture the animals' actions and bring their world to life. Scenes of mother wolf and her pups in the birth cave on left-hand pages face glimpses of the outside environment. When the young ones leave the cave, the illustrator switches to double-page spreads, allowing the sequence of the eagle's attack to play itself out dramatically. Several portraits of the mother and her babies and one of the eagle are exquisitely detailed. The play of light and shadow created by the deft blending of myriad shades of brown and gray results in a sense of depth, of wide expanse, of textured fur and rock-strewn hills. There is a lot of information to be gleaned from this sparely written visual masterpiece.?Susan Scheps, Shaker Heights Public Library, OHCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.