Kali’s Song

Jeanette Winter's Kali's Song is a very short story for 5 year olds about a boy who is handed a bow and finds a completely different use for it.

What happens

It happens thousands and thousands of years ago. Kali watches his mother paint animals onto a cave wall and thinks they look exactly like the ones out on the plains.

Soon he will be a man. That means hunting. His father gives him a bow and tells him to practise for his first hunt.

So Kali practises. He shoots arrows all day, and when he sits down to rest he plucks the bowstring, just once, because he likes the noise it makes.

Then he puts the bow to his lips and opens and closes his mouth, and the sound changes. He forgets about the arrows completely. He plays into the night, and the stars come down to listen.

After that he goes a long way off to practise, where nobody can see. He puts the arrows down. Animals go still. Birds go still. And every evening his father asks how practice went and Kali closes his eyes and says, "Good."

Then the day of the big hunt arrives.

It is a lovely small book to read together, because so little is said and so much is going on underneath it. Your reader will work out what Kali is up to long before his father does, and will probably have opinions about whether telling one small fib every single day is fair enough.

The hunt itself is handled gently. Nobody is chased down and no animal is hurt in front of you, though the whole point is that Kali is supposed to be learning to kill and cannot make himself want to. It is worth being ready for the question "but why do they have to hunt them?", because a five year old will ask it.

There is something quietly brilliant about the ending too, which turns on Kali's mother and her paints. That one is best found rather than described.

What to read next

If you've got a reader who likes a child refusing to be what everybody expects, School for Bandits is in the library. Ralph Raccoon is polite, tidy and brushes his teeth, which is a disaster for a family of bandits, so off he goes to learn some bad manners.