My first encounter with a plucky hero or heroine like the Boo Baby came in second grade at the one-room Keystone School where I fell in love with the story, "Jack and The Northwest Wind." In most all the stories about Jack he was poor and country, like me, but accomplished great things, through courage and trickery, to help out his family at home, and to survive to get by. Later, while teaching fifth grade, I was introduced to the Appalachian Storytelling tradition of Jack at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennesee. My first teacher there was the magnificent and generous Jackie Torrence. Later I would make many visits to the Beech Mountain, NC home of the Ray Hicks family. I was privileged to listen to hours of "Jack Tale tellin'" at the feet of Ray and Ted Hicks keepers and transmitters of the "Jack Tales." Later still, I would visit and come to know and cherish as a mentor, and friend, the great Traveler and Tradition-bearer, Duncan Williamson, of Scotland, who claimed to know sixty stories about Jack, and three thousand stories, ballads, jokes and anecdotes in his repertoire. Hundreds of these are available in the archives of the School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh University in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Of course then there is the classic trickster hero, Brer Rabbit, whose exploits were regular fare for Jackie Torrence's raucous and inspiring tales. From the stage, Jackie would tell us: "Brer Rabbit Belongs to Everyone." Thanks to Diane Wolkstein, from whose telling of the Haitian folk tale, "Owl" years ago on a front porch in the Tennessee Mountains, allowed Bootsie to tell the story here to Boo on a night in the mystic woods. Diane's book , The Magic Orange Tree : And Other Haitian Folktales, collected on her visits to Haitian Villages, is a treasure. "Owl" will teach you about love and loss. And I had a pet Chihuahua-cross named Bootsie on the farm that we lived on along the Nippersink Creek in Northern Illinois. And yes, she herded cattle. As to Bootsie's magical hearing in these Stories? Tahir Shah, in his book, In Arabian Nights , writes that Traditional Storytellers in Morocco believe that stories run underground like streams of words.

The storytellers say that sometimes the words bubble up like springs and when they do, they can teach you things that will change your life. The Boo Baby grew up, no doubt, on stories about Jack and Brer Rabbit, as have tens of thousands of elementary students to whom I've told stories over the last thirty-five years or so. And many of her exploits in this book mirror these classic heroic, trickster adventures.