Wood Magic

Bevis, a small boy on a Wiltshire farm, wanders the garden, the fields, and the reedy edges of a pond called the Longpond, and discovers that the birds, the animals, the wind, and even the stream all speak to him. What starts as a child’s ramble through the countryside opens out into a full animal fable. The woods are ruled by a one-eyed magpie named Kapchack, a local tyrant whose kingdom is besieged from outside by Choo Hoo, the wood pigeon, and his massed armies, and rotted from within by the scheming of the hawk, the crow, and the weasel. Jefferies wrote it in 1881 as the first of two books about Bevis. Its blend of close natural observation and sly political satire gives it a strange, lasting charm for readers of any age.