This book is a quick read, stirring to the imagination and interesting to the intellect. Books like this one, Black Beauty and Raptor Red offer us a particularly transformed way of seeing, by inhabiting so fully the other creatures that have walked the planet.

It's particularly interesting to see the American myths of the frontier through the eyes of this exceptional dog. Some archetypes and ideals transfer precisely from the Manifest Destiny of the humans to the Primordial Mastery of the dog, and some less so. Certainly the frontier is, for both, a Darwinian proving ground where the weak perish and the strong become legend.

What I enjoyed most about the story is the strong hold it finds on the reader's emotions. It gave me goosebumps many times over, and wormed its longing and its call into even my cozy, cat-lover's heart. I read many of its passages aloud (thanks to 3rd season Buffy for the idea) and found them musical and magical. ( )