Friends come in all shapes, sizes, colors
A new title in the Travels with the Pack children’s book series
‘DESERT FRIENDS: TRAVELS WITH THE PACK’
Archway Publishing (2022, 36 pp.)
Would it surprise you to learn that animals in the wild work together with domesticated animals in times of need, as well as to be chummy?
Children’s book author Linda Harkey (“Chatty the Hen Pheasant”) finds a unique angle in sharing stories about hunting dogs who encounter then befriend the very animals they are supposed to track for “the Great One,” their master. In “Chatty,” we met the supremely proud Labrador retriever Cimaroc Lucky Nassau, aka Nassau, who seizes an indignant hen pheasant in a snowstorm in their woodsy home of South Dakota during a hunt. Despite Chatty the hen pheasant’s protestations, Nassau delivers the prey to the Great One, who gently releases the pheasant, to Nassau’s humiliation, reminding his hunting dog that they do not kill the hen in order to protect the pheasant population.
In the newest Travels with the Pack series, two wild friends in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, a chubby Gambel’s quail and a sleek roadrunner, play together and find they have little in common but can still be friends. They ask questions about each other because they are curious and so different.
“Why do you expose the black feathers and skin on your back to the sun?” Rodney the roadrunner asks his quail friend, Quincy. He tells him that is how he warms up.
“Why do people call you a roadrunner?” asks Quincy the quail, wondering about his friend’s skinny tail and beak.
“I’m powerful and fast!” Rodney replies. “Did you know I can outrun a lizard?”
Illustrator Mike Minick carefully delineates the animals so that their traits look lifelike and recognizable.
Later, Rodney magnanimously offers to share a morsel of lizard and tarantula for a snack. He muses, “It just doesn’t get any better than this — food, water and friendship — all in one meal!” The quail, however, is horrified.
“You’re joking, aren’t you?” he replies. “I don’t eat things that are alive.” He prefers his “bean pod delight,” the honey mesquite tree, where he also hides at night from coyotes, snakes and other predators.
The two snooze at their favorite flat sunny bottom of the arroyo, when they hear the noise of intruders. Here come the hunting dogs! “Uh-oh,” chirps Quincy to one of the dogs, Gator, “is it hunting season again?”
But these dogs, Gator and his threelegged crony Tripod, are pals with the quail and roadrunner. And when the arroyo suddenly roars to life with rushing muddy water, the friends all help each other manage an escape.
Harkey has a lovely way of guiding the reader to learn about the lives of these creatures, wild or domesticated, and plays with the young reader’s expectations — for example, why don’t the wild animals feel imperiled when the hunting dogs are pointing at them? They are simply doing their job hunting for the Great One, as well as being protective of the quail and roadrunner.
Author Harkey also inserts streamof-consciousness to the animal characters, to help young readers understand that little critters have thoughts and sensations, too. Quincy thinks about the two dogs in a big thought bubble as they waddle away together in the sunset: “I can’t wait to see them again. This has been the most excitement we’ve ever had!”