The Shiba Force - The Returning

Some are saved. And someone carries the cost of the saving.

High in the mountains, something has been waiting a long, long time.

When the bells that call the Shiba Force home begin to carry a strange new silence--and the smell of old smoke from a fire that burned long before any of them were born--ChiChi, Chance, and Redd set out with ancient Grandma Hoshi toward the one trouble she has spent her whole life traveling away from.

On the cold high stones they find Kuma, a young guardian with bared teeth and borrowed bitterness, and behind him the great ancient Akita whose grief has hung over the mountains like weather for longer than anyone can remember. His name is Makoto. And the secret Hoshi has carried since the year the world burned is this: she did not leave him behind. The road closed. The mountain came down. And she could not go back.

To set it right, the pack must learn the hardest thing the bells have ever asked of them--how to ring for someone who was never called, how to stay beside a hurt they cannot mend, and how to make room, at last, for a fourth.

The Returning is the third book in The Shiba Force series, a literary fable for ages 8-10 in the tradition of Kate DiCamillo and E.B. White--about the wrongs we cannot undo, the truth we owe to those who go quiet, and the long way home.

Fully illustrated with original pen-and-ink chapter illustrations. Includes an Author's Note and Fun Facts About Shibas and Akitas.

The Shiba Force Series: Book One: The Forgetting Book Two: The Drifting Book Three: The Returning