Holling C. Holling · 1941 · road

Holling's 1941 Caldecott Honor book, and the companion to Minn of the Mississippi. A boy in northern Ontario carves a wooden figure in a canoe and leaves it on a snowbank above a stream, and it takes four years to travel the whole Great Lakes system and reach the Atlantic - over Niagara Falls on the way.

1. 1
   Lake Nipigon

   A boy in the Nipigon country carves a foot-long Indian in a canoe, writes on the bottom that whoever finds him should put him back in the water, and sets him on a snowbank above a stream to wait for the thaw.

2. 2
   Lake Superior

   Down through the sawmills and out into the biggest of the lakes - and Holling's margins fill with logging, iron ore, weather and the shape of a continent's drainage, which is what the book is actually teaching.

3. 3
   Sault Ste Marie

   Through the locks between Superior and Huron, carried by a freighter's crew who read the message and put him back in - the pattern of the whole book: people find him, keep him a while, and send him on.

4. 4
   Lake Huron

   Georgian Bay and the North Channel, frozen in over a winter and released again - a carved canoe moving at the speed of ice and current across four years and two thousand miles.

5. 5
   Lake Erie

   The shallowest lake and the busiest, past the steel towns - and then the current takes him toward the one place on the route that ought to destroy him.

6. 6
   Niagara Falls

   Over the falls, which he survives because he is made of wood and weighted to float upright - the moment every child who has read this book remembers, and the reason the ending works.

7. 7
   Lake Ontario

   The last lake, and out into the St Lawrence - the fifth of the Great Lakes and the beginning of the river that drains all of them into the Atlantic.

8. 8
   Quebec

   Down the seaway past Montreal and Quebec, in the tidal river where the water turns salt - and a fishing boat picks him up on the Grand Banks, four years after a boy left him on a snowbank.

9. 9
   The Atlantic

   Picked up in a net off Newfoundland and sent on to France, and eventually home - Holling's point being that a continent's water all goes to the same place, and a child can follow it there.