"What makes this book outstanding is that, while telling an engaging traditional story, it also introduces readers to the customs of a traditional people. Gerelchimeg Blackcrane brings this Ewenki story to life, while Jiu'er's illustrations portray in fine detail the folk life of Inner Mongolia's forests and mountains. This lovely picture book brings traditional life, traditional storytelling and a moving plot together beautifully."
—— Citation for the 2020 Aesop Accolade, American Folklore Society

"This book lets children see the harmonious, mutually supportive relationship between human beings and nature, and with the whole ecosystem. That is exactly why it appealed to us. We love its stirring story and the great vision of nature you have drawn."
—— Alain Serres, editor-in-chief of Rue du Monde (France), in a letter to Blackcrane and Jiu'er

"It stands out among the many texts on this subject, with a breadth and stature that represent original Chinese picture books."
—— Recommendation for the 14th Wenjin Book Award, National Library of China

"This is a realistic work about people and nature living in harmony. The author's poetic, economical prose records the deep companionship between an Ewenki hunter and a moose calf; the illustrator's precise, delicate pictures retell this legend of two lives bound to each other and bring back the true grandeur of the old-growth forests of northern China. The book's two characters are human beings and nature in miniature, living together through mutual adjustment, tolerance, reverence and watchfulness, and they give children a deeply moving lesson about life."
—— Citation for the Picture Book Era Award

★ Rights sold in nine languages, including World English, World French, German, Korean and Swedish.
★ The work was selected for the IBBY Honour List; the English edition won a 2020 Aesop Accolade from the American Folklore Society, the second work by a Chinese creator so honored since the prize began. The French edition also came in a special four-seasons calendar edition, and an excerpt was used in a French primary-school reading competition.
★ Author Blackcrane won the Mao Dun Literature Prize for New Writers; illustrator Jiu'er was the first Chinese woman named to the IBBY Honour List. They also made the companion book "The Bears of Oroqen", selected for the 2023 China Good Books list.
★ An old hunter accidentally shoots a mother moose; her orphaned calf follows him home. He raises it, then, sensing death near, sends it back to the forest. The Ewenki have passed down the story ever since: deep in the woods, a mighty moose keeps watch day and night over the dead hunter.
★ A picture book that helps children understand meeting, raising and letting go, and a visual record of a vanishing Ewenki hunting culture, drawn in charcoal pencil and watercolor as people and wilderness protect one another.

The reindeer-herding Ewenki live in the vast forests of the Greater Khingan Range in northern China, making their living by herding reindeer and hunting. On one hunt, the old hunter Glisk accidentally shoots a nursing mother moose. The orphaned calf follows him all the way back to his camp, and he names it "Little Calf".

Little Calf grows day by day into a moose as mighty as a giant beast, while Glisk grows old. He knows clearly that the human world is too dangerous for a moose. Sensing that his life is drawing to an end, the old hunter chooses to let go: it is time for Little Calf to go back to the forest.

From then on, the story is passed by word of mouth among the Ewenki: deep in the vast forest there is a moose as mighty as a giant beast, keeping watch day and night over Glisk, the hunter who died there.

The book draws on the real life of the reindeer-herding Ewenki and is a picture book developed from the author's animal fiction, suitable for children aged 5 and up. Illustrator Jiu'er worked throughout in charcoal pencil and watercolor, in a near-monochrome palette dominated by light brown, setting a restrained, weighty tone for the story — in her own words, it is "more like an elegy for the wilderness culture of the north".

Blackcrane
Of Mongol heritage, he is a nature writer and a researcher of China's native dog breeds. He grew up where grassland meets farmland, with two cream-colored Mongolian shepherd dogs as companions. His novels include Black Flame, Ghost Dog, Black Dog Haranohai, Wolverine River, Blood Colt, Smoke over Wolf Valley and Six Seasons with the Reindeer, among others; with Jiu'er he has made the picture books "The Moose of Ewenki", Twelve Puppies and The Little Hunting Dog on the Grassland. His awards include the Five-One Project Award for Outstanding Works, the National Award for Outstanding Children's Literature and the Vitaly Bianki International Literature Award, among others. In 2020 he was named to the IBBY Honour List as an author for "The Moose of Ewenki". His work has been translated into more than ten languages and reaches both children and adults. He lives on the Hulunbuir grassland, where he keeps large guardian dogs at his own camp, works to improve the breeding of Mongolian shepherd dogs, and gives puppies free of charge to herders on the grassland.

Jiu'er
Sculptor and picture-book creator. After many years in sculpture design, she began making and studying picture books in 2013, working across a wide range of subjects and styles. In 2016 she became the first Chinese woman illustrator named to the IBBY Honour List, for her illustrations in Don't Jump Rope with a Frog. Her awards include the Wenjin Book Award, an Honorable Mention at the Feng Zikai Chinese Children's Picture Book Award, the Golden Picture Book Era Award, the Chen Bochui International Children's Literature Award for Picture Book of the Year, the Aesop Accolade (US) and a Silver Award in children's literature from the Freeman Book Awards (US). She has served as a judge for the first Zhang Leping Picture Book Award and for the Golden Windmill Young Illustrators Competition at the China Shanghai International Children's Book Fair. Her books have been published in France, the United States, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Sweden, India and South Korea, as well as in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan, China. Her main works include Sister's Big Pumpkin, Monster Mountain, Don't Jump Rope with a Frog, The Hometown I Can't Return To, Just the Right Encounter, Twelve Puppies, The Little Hunting Dog on the Grassland, "The Moose of Ewenki", The Cat Living in the Tree, Grandma Yulan's Straw Hat, The Journey, Mr. Black and His Dog, Button Soldier and The Elephant's Journey.

Note 1: The Last Hunter
By Blackcrane

The reindeer-herding Ewenki are the part of the Ewenki people who live deep in the old-growth forests of the Greater Khingan Range in northern China, living by hunting and by raising reindeer, which they also use to carry loads.
Ewenki is the name the people use for themselves; it has been glossed as "those who live in the mountain forests" and "those who live on the south-facing slopes". Within China, Ewenki communities historically lived in different regions and were known by different names. In the early 1950s, those settled along the Hailar River — in the Ewenki Autonomous Banner, Arun Banner, Zalantun, the Morin Dawa Daur Autonomous Banner and Nehe — who farmed and raised livestock were called Solon; those who moved with their herds in the Xini River valley of Chen Barag Banner were called Tungus; and those living deep in the forests of the Greater Khingan Range and hunting for a living were called Yakut. In March 1958, at the wish of Ewenki people in each of these regions, the Chinese government decided to replace the three names — Solon, Tungus and Yakut — with the single name "Ewenki".
The reindeer-herding Ewenki, then, are this group: Ewenki who live in the forest by hunting and who also raise reindeer. Historical records call them the "Reindeer Tungus" or the "Reindeer-Using Tungus".
According to those records, these Ewenki first lived in the tundra and forest country of Transbaikalia, along the Vilyuy and Vitim rivers in the northeastern Lena basin. Before China and Russia signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, they moved — to escape war and pressure from Russian settlers — to the Mohe area on a right-bank tributary of the upper Amur. In the nineteenth century they moved again, into the deep forests of the Greater Khingan Range east and south of the Argun River, where they lived mainly by hunting and raised reindeer to carry their goods. Before 1949 the community was still living in the final phase of a pre-industrial hunting society, and outsiders knew them simply as "the hunters". After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the government, in deference to their customs and their own wishes, allowed the hunters to go on hunting with rifles in the forest. In 1957 it set up the Qi'gan Ewenki Ethnic Township on the Argun River near the China–Russia border, with a supply-and-marketing cooperative, a clinic and a primary school, to improve their lives. In 1965, to make transport easier, the government helped them move nearer the railway, to Aoluguya, where the Aoluguya Ewenki Ethnic Township — "Old Aoluguya" — was established, with its seat at Mangui.
In August 2003, the hunters of Aoluguya answered a government call to lay down their rifles and give up hunting for good, and moved to a permanent settlement, New Aoluguya, on the east bank of the Xiwuqiya River on the western outskirts of Genhe, Inner Mongolia.
Today there are fewer than 300 reindeer-herding Ewenki. Some still keep reindeer at their camps in the hills, holding to the way of life that has always been theirs.
The reindeer-herding Ewenki and their reindeer have never left the forest.
The moose (Latin Alces alces; English moose) is the largest member of the deer family. In China it is found in the Greater and Lesser Khingan Ranges, the Wanda Mountains and Xinjiang; it also ranges widely across the northern parts of Eurasia and North America, a typical herbivore of the subarctic coniferous forest. Its shoulders stand higher than its haunches — up to two meters at the shoulder — and it towers like a camel, which is why the Chinese name is literally "camel-deer". A bull grows broad, flattened antlers that are shed each year, like a giant's open palms; at their widest they can span two meters. It is, without question, the giant of the forest. In northern China the moose has always been quarry for the hunting peoples, who call it kandahan, or simply han.
For as long as anyone can remember, the moose was the most important source of meat for reindeer-herding Ewenki hunters. The meat was food, but the hide, the sinews, the bones and the great antlers each had their uses as well; after a hunt, almost nothing was wasted.
Not so long ago, if the Ewenki failed to take enough moose in autumn to make dried meat, the hard winter that followed brought the terrible consequences of a food shortage — a matter of life and death.
The fate of the moose and the fate of the reindeer-herding Ewenki have always been bound together.
The Ewenki hunted moose for generations, yet over the three centuries and more in which they roamed the hunting grounds of the Greater Khingan Range east and south of the Argun, the moose population in the forest never declined. The hunters divided their grounds fairly and took animals only in season, following the turning of the forest year; to let the herds renew themselves, they never took a cow in the breeding season, or a calf.
I wrote this story because, many years ago, an old reindeer-herding Ewenki woman named Balajieyi told me a story about a moose. (She died in 2017; may her soul go with the wind.) At the time, she had taken in a moose calf that had been abandoned in the forest, for reasons no one knew. The calf had a startling appetite and could empty a pot of rice porridge mixed with reindeer milk in the blink of an eye. Later, when it had grown large enough, Balajieyi sent it back to the forest.
That is how the reindeer-herding Ewenki regard living things: they hunt, but they do not kill without need; they take only what they must to survive, and a weak orphan they will carefully foster and protect — only to send it back to the forest in the end.
More than ten years have passed since I first stumbled on a reindeer-herding Ewenki camp in the northern forest, and every year since I have gone back to that forest to visit my friends there. I have driven off bears that came prowling round the camp; I have taken in a reindeer calf whose mother was killed by a bear; breakfast at the camp is lieba bread and reindeer-milk tea; and the Mongolian shepherd dogs I brought there are now in their fifth generation.
I thank my reindeer-herding Ewenki friends for letting me witness the last hunting age of China's northern forests.
I thank the illustrator Jiu'er, who gave my story new life in another form.
This book is for the northern forest, and for the reindeer-herding Ewenki who have always lived in it.

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Note 2: A Story of the Northern Forest
By Jiu'er

As a picture-book artist, I had been waiting for a story — a different kind of story. I waited a long time.
Then I read the writer Blackcrane's novella Han, and it was the story I had been waiting for. That is how this picture book, The Moose of Ewenki, came to be.
It is a story about the Ewenki, one of China's northern ethnic minorities, and its tone is steady, weighty and far-reaching; it is not a blaze of color, and that was exactly what I had hoped for.
The book runs to just over sixty illustrations. It tells a sober story, and I did not want to dwell on scenes of reindeer-herding Ewenki daily life: a picture book must tell the story first, so I let the basic details of that life appear as naturally as they could. Even so, the writer, the editors and I did a great deal of fieldwork and research to bring every detail in the pictures as close as possible to the real life of the reindeer-herding Ewenki. Nothing is there that the story does not need.
To make this book I travelled for the first time to the heart of the Greater Khingan forests in northern China. From that day on, this people — until then a mystery to me — took on a different meaning, and the feeling went straight into my work. The book opens without color, as if we were leafing through a historical document, or watching a documentary or an old film; only when the moose calf appears does a first bright note enter the pictures. Five double-page spreads before the title page set up where the calf came from, a device borrowed from film. The true story begins at the title page: the legend of an old hunter and a motherless moose calf who stayed together for life.
A few words about the book itself.
1. On color
The whole book is drawn in charcoal pencil and watercolor. I first made a fairly detailed charcoal drawing on watercolor paper, then stretched the sheet and laid in watercolor. I kept the color restrained: much of the book is close to monochrome, in charcoal pencil and light brown. Charcoal readily carries a weighty tone, and the warm-toned watercolor paper I chose gives the images the yellowed patina of age I was after. This story, I felt, should not be busy with color; the palette exists to bring out the heavier part of life. It is more like an elegy for the wilderness culture of the north.
2. On animals and plants
There are not many animals in this book. Besides the reindeer and the moose, there is a bob-tailed hunting dog, and he is one of the important characters. I had meant to hide other animals in the forest, but the dog is always at the hunter's side, and a hunting dog's instinct would not allow other animals within sight — in the picture, at least. Otherwise he would not be so quiet. So I gave up several animals that would certainly have made the pages more appealing, and drew only a few squirrels and small birds. It may be a loss in charm and richness, but the writer and I agreed that reality had to come first here. It is a matter of respect for a people's history and culture. After all, this is realist, observational work, not a fairy tale.
As for plants, there are not many of those either. They appear rather more often on the color pages, above all on the spread where the old hunter takes the moose back into the deep forest. For that I studied an illustrated flora of the Greater Khingan Range. The medium and the settings limited what I could show, and I had to choose, reluctantly, about ten of the commonest species.
3. On the figure of the old hunter
The old hunter was modelled on a real reindeer-herding Ewenki hunter, Uncle Andao, who still lives at a reindeer camp in the forest. His character follows from who he is. A man alone in the forest, living by raising reindeer, would be tempered by years of that life into someone steady, unflappable and sparing with words. Whenever I felt my drawing of him was not vivid enough, Blackcrane reassured me: that, he said, is exactly what a reindeer-herding Ewenki hunter should be like.
4. On his clothing and the everyday setting
The reindeer-herding Ewenki live in conical tents, called xierenjiu in their own language — the cuoluozi — and the simple, practical objects of daily life appear in the pictures too. The story seems to take place around the 1950s, a little distant from a young reader's experience, so I added a few slightly more modern touches, such as an iron stove. The hunter's clothes, though, are drawn exactly to traditional Ewenki pattern, and are simple: a long-sleeved deerskin jacket, a deerskin vest, a belt, a white Russian-style shirt, ordinary trousers, fur boots. When I began, I found many beautiful photographs of Ewenki clothing online, but Blackcrane told me that the Ewenki are divided into three groups, and that some of those images were not of reindeer-herding Ewenki dress at all. On this point I had to follow the facts.
When the book was finished, I took stock. A story can be illustrated in any number of ways; an artist may choose an easy manner or one that looks like hard work, and I chose the latter. My thanks to the writer Blackcrane: I drew every line of this book myself, but he carried a good deal of the pressure too, and helped me through the anxiety of making it. And my thanks to my editors, who put up with the occasional breakdown that came with that pressure. You are kind people. Thank you again for letting me do something I love so much, and draw a book I truly love.
I hope you enjoy The Moose of Ewenki.