Ardıç, look! Kahve and Yeşil are over there!
Shall we go and see them?
Along the edge of the canal, slowly, OK?
Why?
This is their home – we can’t just barge in.
And yet barge in we have. While trying to instil a love of animals and environmental awareness in Ardıç, I glanced around me at the houses lined up on either side of the narrow canal. I wondered what these ducks, moorhens, geese and herons had been doing before these houses were here. As two mallards – one glossy green, one speckled brown – glided silently over the still water, I built them a new life in my mind.
Spending time in nature has intellectual benefits like this too. Füsun Çetinel, for instance, wrote a sweet story inspired by a polite bear she met while camping in the Ilgaz Mountains; the characters, the setting and the sounds came to life in Cansu Dinç’s illustrations, and Günışığı Kitaplığı brought it to readers. The world is home to us all – on that we agree – but Dikkat İnsan Çıkabilir! (Beware: Humans About!) is a playful reminder that humans are not the only species living in this bountiful home.
It all begins with a family of bears woken from the best part of their winter sleep by a terrible clatter. The noise isn’t coming from bulldozers sent to clear the forest or anything like that, but from a family hoping to enjoy a picnic. As far as they’re concerned, there’s nothing wrong – but let’s see what the bear family thinks.
It isn’t normal. Waking every morning to the “tak tak tak, tok tok tok” of demolition or construction in one of the buildings just steps away; spending the whole day, as you go from home to work, from work to an outing and back home again, as a guest of never-ending building sites in the background – it isn’t normal. While humankind tries to find a remedy for the degradation and shrinking of its own living space through civilised means, sarcastic videos and grumbling to itself, the law of the forest works differently. Will this bear family make way for strangers who break their sleep with noise, scatter all kinds of waste around and damage every gift of nature, from tree branches to mushrooms?
It had been a long time since I had seen such a heartfelt, enormous, natural roar. Ah, I said to that “wild” bear, well done – and they say beware, there may be bears! Yet the thing to beware of is not meeting a bear in the forest; what we really must take care not to forget is that we may be in a bear’s home.
Let’s put some bread outside the door, and then Yeşil and Kahve can come to our house.
Of course they can, son.
This story is for those who can respect every kind of living creature, for those who step into the forest on tiptoe. Happy reading, everyone.
Long live children’s books.
