Fox and Bear

Written and illustrated by Miriam Körner

Red Deer Press

978-0-889956469

32 pp.

Ages 5-8

January 2023

 

Though life for most animals revolves around the search for food and may seem mundane by human standards, Bear thinks life is pretty good. He loves picking berries while Fox hunts for eggs. And in between the search for food, Bear takes naps and enjoys the daily sunset while Fox searches for treasures and hides them. But then Fox has an idea. What if he could make their food forays more efficient?

From Fox and Bear by Miriam Körner

They start with cages to trap geese and keep them as egg-layers. They also gather more berries and seeds and plant them. Though their aim was to spend less time searching for food, all their chores require more effort, and Fox and Bear rarely have time for the pleasures of naps, treasure hunting and sunsets. So, Fox comes up with another idea.

 

This time, Fox draws up plans for a complex set of machines to gather eggs, feed the birds, water the plants, and pick the berries. Unfortunately, they have to dig up mountains and cut down trees for their contraption. And there were new jobs of gathering wood for the steam engines, filling the bird feeder and building more cages. As their work became more efficient, it became bigger and more involved and time-consuming. Eventually Bear realizes that their new efforts are greater than their past ones and their original daily tasks were the best of all.

From Fox and Bear by Miriam Körner

Fox and Bear could be an updated version of an Aesop's fable. Whether the message is about greed or ensuring that progress is actually an improvement, Fox and Bear remind us that bigger is not always best. A simple life of earnest food-searching and basic pleasures like napping and sunset-watching are not to be dismissed. Our world today is so focused on getting bigger and more that those who adhere to the principles of simple and meaningful are disregarded. It's reassuring to see that, although Bear goes along with Fox's plans, he eventually realizes what is best for him. What Fox decides is up to the reader as Miriam Körner leaves it open as to whether he too will return to his former life or stick with his new busy and overworked lifestyle. (This would be an interesting lesson for students to consider.)

Author-illustrator Miriam Körner lives in Northern Saskatchewan, and I suspect that the very landscape she sees outside her cabin's window is what has given her Fox and Bear's story. The destruction of forests for development must be seen in her northern community, whether for commercial farming, forestry, mining or settlements. Perhaps those behind all that economic planning should be reading Fox and Bear along with young readers.

From Fox and Bear by Miriam Körner

Behind her impactful story is Miriam Körner's artwork which is extraordinary. She has created dioramas from recycled paper and cardboard packaging painted with graphite pencils, soft pastels and acrylic paint. Through a limited palette of browns with red for fox and occasional hints of blue or black, Miriam Körner gives Fox and Bear an organic and very realistic feel to the natural world. Even when she introduces the machinery that Fox implements for efficiency, the cut of the paper and shape of her structures, though of the same colours, shouts of the manufactured and the synthetic. I'm a big fan of textures in picture book illustrations and, by photographing dioramas she has made of the paper and cardboard, Miriam Körner introduces even further textures with shadows and a three-dimensionality to the art. Miriam Körner's artwork presents a story of such quality that readers will be drawn in by the art but will stay for the fable that simple is sometimes actually best.

Sukaq and the Raven

by Roy Goose and Kerry McCluskey

Artwork by Soyeon Kim

Inhabit Media

978-1-77227-139-3

36 pp.

Ages 5-7

October 2017

Little Sukaq who lives in Apex, Nunavut is sweet and fast and loves hearing stories from his anaana as he drifts off to sleep.  His favourite story is an Inuit tale of the raven creating the universe.

From Sukaq and the Raven 

by Roy Goose and Kerry McCluskey 

illus. by Soyeon Kim

In the best of storytelling traditions, his anaana (mother) tells him that she'd "heard from a friend of mine, who heard it from his grandmother, who also heard it from someone else. This story is very, very old." (pg. 7)  As she tells him of the biggest raven that ever existed, Sukaq closes his eyes and imagines himself on the back of the raven, flying through the night sky.  As the raven glides through the cold sky, snow gathering on his wings, he flings a giant snowball off and creates a place upon which he can rest. And so Earth is made.

From Sukaq and the Raven 

by Roy Goose and Kerry McCluskey

 illus. by Soyeon Kim

Then the raven, seeking light, pecks at the ground whereupon a plant begins to grow. From this plant, the raven grabs something bright and tosses it into the air for warmth and light.  When that sun sets, the raven wants light in the dark so he pecks at the ground again and from a new emerging plant derives a shiny object which, when flung into the sky, becomes the moon.

Finally, the raven seeks a partner. Pecking at the ground one last time, he reveals a new plant emerging with a woman inside. But before he can be a true partner, he must transform from raven to man in blue parka, expertly depicted by artist Soyeon Kim.

Inuit storyteller Roy Goose shared this story with writer Kerry McCluskey when she researched her first book Tulugaq: An Oral History of Ravens (Inhabit Media, 2013) and now the story has new wings to share with others beyond the Arctic. By telling an origin story with a little boy dreaming of accompanying the giant raven as it creates the universe brings the story from legend to something more personal and even bigger.  But it's Soyeon Kim's dioramic illustrations that propel Sukaq and the Raven into even greater depths of storytelling.  Though the art may appear to be collages, Soyeon Kim actually crafts three-dimensional dioramas of scenes for the picture books she illustrates.  You can appreciate the true complexity of her dioramas on her website www.kimsoyeonart.com.  From Sukaq's home landscape of northern lights, colourful houses and flying ravens to the cold of a dark sky and the emerging plants that bring forth elements of the universe, Soyeon Kim breathes life into the story, taking it from just text to a full-bodied story as might have been heard from Roy Goose himself.

From Sukaq and the Raven 

by Roy Goose and Kerry McCluskey 

illus. by Soyeon Kim