A Snake Falls to Earth: Newbery Honor Award Winner

by Darcie Little Badger

with her twelve siblings, she visited their homeland: loops of long, hoof-hardened paths winding through well-kept prairie gardens and blocks of earthen buildings. There, farmers tended fields of maize: the bright, jewellike kernels brought living rainbows to the land every harvest season. Adobe towers overlooked the meandering trails, and clear bathing pools glinted under the pseudosun. It was the most prosperous city in the central continent, a hub of agricultural trade and art. Then, with no warning, all the bison people fell ill. Even the originators, who’d lived for centuries. They were too fatigued to farm, too exhausted to transform. They no longer strolled down the mazelike garden paths or tended their crops. No more bison babies were born, and deaths washed across the city like a flood.