One spring day in 1869 Shag, a buffalo calf, was born in the West. In those days millions of buffalo roamed the plains, and the wild red calf and his mother joined one of the great herds moving northward.

The life of the buffalo was a hard one. In the cruel blizzards of November some of the herd, blinded by snow, stumbled over cliffs and fell to their death on the jagged rocks below. In mid-April many of Shag's companions were drowned in a river whose frozen surface cracked under their weight. But most of the buffalo survived—despite hunger and thirst, mountain lions and wolves, mosquitoes and locusts—until the white hunters came to the West. Then the years of slaughter began, and by 1884, when Shag was hiding in the remote wilderness of the Yellowstone, only a few hundred wild buffalo were left.

The story of Shag is one of Robert McClung's most moving life-cycle books. Louis Darling's stunning illustrations vividly re-create the vast and lonely prairies, and the huge, shaggy beasts that once blackened the land.

From the dust jacket