[.ca] Angelique: Buffalo Hunt (Our Canadian Girl) (ISBN 0141002719)

Amazon.ca:
Ten-year-old Angelique Dumas can't wait for the spring buffalo hunt because this year she will be doing a special job--a boy's job. Her father has chosen her to run ahead of the women and the other Métis children to search among the fallen buffalo for his marker: a beaded glove that will help identify which slaughtered animals belong to their family. If it wasn't for her recurring dream about a dying buffalo, Angelique would be perfectly happy. Set in 1865 among the Métis of Manitoba's Red River Valley, Angelique: Buffalo Hunt is another of the carefully delineated portraits in Penguin's Our Canadian Girl series of historical fiction for young girls. Authored by respected children's writers and packaged to appeal to 8- to 12-year-olds, each of these easy-to-read chapter books focuses on a significant moment in Canadian history as experienced by a typical girl of the times. Taylor, whose award-winning novels for children include The Doll and Summer of the Mad Monk, has embedded Angelique with as many details about 19th-century Métis life as there are beads on a pair of moccasins. She invites her readers to experience what it would be like to wake up in a teepee, eat bannock for breakfast, and gather sun-baked chips of buffalo dung as fire fuel. She also manages to tell a unified and gripping story about a caring young Métis girl, a noble horse, and an angry buffalo. Pretty impressive for 85 pages. --Lisa Alward