My Bison

K-Gr 2–“The first time I saw him, it was springtime. I was walking in the tall grass. My mother picked me up so that I could see him. ‘Look!’ she said. ‘He’s back!’” So begins a lifelong friendship between a girl and a bison. The first time he leaves, she is lonely without him. But the bison returns every winter. He and the girl share stories of their time apart by the fire. He is, most of all, a good listener. The moody charcoal-and-ink illustrations poignantly depict the tenderness between them. The girl and bison grow old together until “one winter, my bison didn’t come. I looked for him for a long time. In the forest, I felt like a little girl again. But I didn’t find him.” The now old woman returns home with a heavy heart. “And in my heart I heard him say, ‘I am in every single spring flower, every sound in the forest, and every snowflake.’ He was always with me. He had never left.” This gorgeously illustrated, gentle story is a reminder about the power and importance in the connection between humans and nature, and how one is never alone when one is with nature.