Called Blue Boy for his blue-black coat, he and Maggie become hunting companions-Maggie spies the prey and Blue Boy brings it down. The wolf saved Maggie from a fox, and she decides to guide him back to his family. Maggie soon sets out to see the wider world, throwing in her lot with a wolf recently captured in Canada and released in nearby Yellowstone. Jackson tells her, "If I've learned anything over the years, it's this: you can't be loyal to others if you're not loyal to your own nature first." He tells her about their surroundings and explains "only winged creatures have souls." She confides in him her dissatisfaction with staying in the nest with her mate, who fills it so full of "bric-a-brac" there's hardly room for their eggs. Jackson the crow serves as teacher for Maggie's hungry mind. She shudders at her unoriginal name and pines to see what's outside of her nest at the Triple Bar T ranch in Montana.
Narrator Maggie is a magpie born with curiosity and wanderlust. Now, in Firstborn, the author applies his talents to an interspecies friendship in Yellowstone National Park, where wolves have just been re-introduced.
In The Wainscott Weasel, Tor Seidler masterfully used interspecies romance to explore an animal community on the South Fork of Long Island, N.Y. Themes of self-acceptance, devotion, and integrity resonate as Maggie and others act on wisdom she learns from her first friend, Jackson the crow: “you can’t be loyal to others if you’re not loyal to your own nature first.” A moving acknowledgement of true friendship provides a heartwarming conclusion to this absorbing tale.
National Book Award finalist Seidler illuminates a world full of beauty (“leaves had broken out of their buds, like butterflies out of their cocoons”), danger, and the struggle to survive: deaths come fast and frequent for predators and prey alike. After Maggie realizes that she is different from other magpies (“the thought of spending my whole life with Dan and his junk made me shudder”), she takes off to explore the wilderness of Montana and Wyoming just as wolves are being reintroduced to Yellowstone Park. The designation “firstborn” applies to several characters in Seidler’s animal adventure-the effervescent narrator, Maggie the magpie Blue Boy, a wolf who accepts Maggie as an unofficial pack member and Lamar, Blue Boy’s eldest son, who wrestles with familial duties and his unorthodox love for a coyote.
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