Animals by the Numbers

Counting Winter – written by Nancy White Carlstrom, illustrated by Claudia McGehee
Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2024

Nancy White has written more than sixty children’s books, including the Jesse Bear series about ordinary moments and their significance in the lives of young children.  In Counting Winter, she enumerates different animals who are native to the Alaskan environment where her children grew up.  Claudia McGehee’s scratchboard and watercolor pictures are both accurate and expressionistic, giving musk oxen, sled dogs, owls, and others a lifelike character. The book is a work of great beauty, both for children learning to count and for those way beyond that milestone.

The text has the illuminating power of Haiku, capturing snapshots of natural life. “Four red squirrels feast/ at their midden full of cones/hungrily/cracking winter.” The poetic resonance of the words makes this far more than an effective counting book. The use of “midden” defamiliarizes the scene a bit, inviting an explanation.  The squirrels are feasting, rather than just eating, and the metaphor of “cracking winter,” rather than nuts, elevates the tone without any pretension.

Personification of animals is appealing. McGehee’s applies this with subtlety. Her owl looks out at the reader intently, but definitely as the member of a different species. A sled dog races through the snow, his panting tongue and determined eyes could belong to a human runner. In the final two-page spreads, people enter the picture. They ride sleds and throw snowballs along with the wild creatures. One figure stretches her arms out to embrace the whole universe of winter.     Descriptions of the animals, as well as extended author’s and illustrator’s notes, shed light on the background and methods of the book’s creators.