GRAY FOX

A quiet, poetic text and luminous art depict a fox's year from fall to summer when, mesmerized by headlights, he's struck by a truck on a country road. Discovering the perfect-looking, still-warm body, a farm boy cradles it in his arms and finds it ``a bed of grass where deer have slept,'' offering a prayer for the fox's spirit. The narrative continues to the next spring, when Gray Fox's cubs have cubs of their own that look and behave like him. Sauber's shimmering realistic paintings, skillfully delineating the foxes and evoking the changing light and color of the seasons, recall Blake's lovely art for Blyler's Finding Foxes (1991); but while London's style is lyrical, his book is less philosophical and more informational than Blyler's. A good balance between tenderness toward life and recognition that it goes on after an individual death. (Picture book. 4-9)