Wolf's Tooth

By the time Elias Walsh, a schoolteacher's son, and Thomas Three Feathers, a young Tonkawa, meet at an isolated 19th century Texas reservation, fighting between whites and and Native Americans is nearly over. But the tragic time of forced accommodationof whites edging tribes into dependencyhas begun. Thomas himself has been victimized by white men many times and yet, as he explains to Elias, ""you can't change that.'' This story of boyhood friendship is unusually well rounded, with violent rites of passage and moments of gentleness and warmth. Some readers will argue that wolves do not attack human beings, as they do here, but scenes in which the boys hunt wolves, as well as buffalo and deer, are central to the plot. The Wolf's Tooth, though it lacks developed secondary characters, probes a universal theme: the central difficulty, as Thomas says, of knowing what another person feels. Ages 10-14. (May)