The Big Snow

When the geese begin to fly south, the leaves flutter down from the trees and the cold winds begin to blow from the north, the animals of the woods and meadows, big and small, prepare for the long, cold winter ahead when the countryside is hidden under a deep blanket of snow. They gather food and look for warm, snug places in the ground, trees, caves or thickets, where they can find protection against the icy winds. It might have been hard for the birds and animals of the hillside to survive when the Big Snow came if their good friends, who lived in the little stone house, had not remembered to put food out for them. Here, in many beautiful pictures, the Haders show how winter comes to the woodland as the busy animals make their preparations.

Berta and Elmer Hader live in the country in a stone house which they built themselves. They love the birds and animals of the woods and make pets of many of them. Their house on Willow Hill on the Palisades overlooks the Hudson River at Nyack, and they have experienced many a big snow, when it was almost impossible to leave their hillside. So the events of this delightful picture-storybook are very real and you may be sure that the Haders were the people in that stone house who put food out for the creatures of the woods and meadows during the winter of the Big Snow.