At fourteen, you are no longer a child. You understand more, you know people better, you feel nature more subtly. Dima went on a long sable hunt with one thought: with the first killed animal he would be transformed and return to the city as a real man. The guide to the adult world is Uncle Nikolai Nikolaevich, who can read footprints in the snow better than Dima reads his books. The young man will be helped by the joker Artemych, the reluctant hunter Vitya, and the sensitive husky Tamga - but the meeting with the elusive raven will be a revelation. A multi-day sable sore is an adventure that you can tell your classmates about for more than a day or two. The best moment is this: Dima takes aim at the nimble animal, pulls the trigger, joyfully shouts: “Headshot!” – everything is like in a computer game! Could the young man imagine that his will and courage would be useful to him for something other than this, and that he would have to share completely different stories with his friends? Dima, like many teenage heroes in the books of Evgeny Rudashevsky, hangs between the world of childhood and the universe of adults. In “The Crow,” as in his other stories “Hello, my brother Bzou!” and “Where Kumutkan Goes”, Evgeniy Rudashevsky creates a kind of silent dialogue between the two main characters - man and animal. In the behavior of these “interlocutors”, in their fate, there is something subtly common. Maybe it’s the need to overcome a difficult moment for the sake of future life, or maybe it’s the loneliness of one who has strayed from the flock, the loneliness of a creature that has left its cozy nest for the first time. Pyotr Zakharov’s illustrations echo the mood of the book and aggravate the internal conflict that the main character is experiencing. The writer carefully preserves the tales and wisdom of hunters, their language, rich in significant nuances: chicken on the branches in the morning or amber is a fundamental question. The story “The Raven” easily ranks with the works of James Fenimore Cooper and Vitaly Bianchi, and at the same time it is distinctly, unconditionally modern. Dima is flesh and blood of the 21st century. Nature for him is not a workshop or a temple: he himself, the raven, and countless trees in the taiga, all of them are inhabitants of a common home, the only one and therefore priceless.