A Crow's Journey

With elegant illustrations and quiet rhyming stanzas Cunningham (Nightfall, Country Lake) answers a crow's question, ""Where does it go,/ this mountain snow,/ each spring?"" Beginning with a trickle of melted snow on a still mountainside, the book traces the water's path from brook, to waterfall, to trout stream and, eventually, to the wide ocean. Composed with a photographic clarity, the gouache paintings are surrounded with clean white borders and embellished in the upper left-hand corner with the gray silhouette of the crow. Cunningham's rhymed quatrains, just two short lines per double-page spread, set a tone of reverence for the natural world: the reader sees a delicate golden leaf floating on the water's surface (""On the current/ a leaf is drawn"") and after the turn of the page, a rainbow hidden in a billowing waterfall (""to the waterfall-/ then it's gone!). Both the beauty of the paintings and Cunningham's lyrical but simple language will make the subject comprehensible for even youngest readers, yet preserve its interest for adults. All ages. (Mar.)