Song of the forest

the long version

"The eleven stories retold in this book by Isabel Barclay are all about birds and animals. One or two come from the Prairies and the Pacific Northwest; the rest belong to the people of the eastern woodlands. The illustrations have been taken from a seventeenth-century manuscript in the Public Archives of Canada know as 'Les raretes des Indes'. It is believed to be the work of a young Jesuit, Louis Nicolas, who recorded in these extraordinary and beautiful drawings his impressions of the strange animals who lived in the wilderness to which he had come."--abebooks.