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Donovan is hungry for a special kind of breakfast . . . Makwa

It's breakfast time and Donovan knows exactly what he wants this morning Not eggs, not pancakes, not cereal. No, what he wants is BEAR, just like his grandfather used to eat for breakfast

So Donovan sets off to bag a bear of his own, going on an adventurous hunt through the woods, where he stalks and is stalked by an ant, a squirrel, and a dog -- but they are not bears, so he shoos them away

When Donovan finally meets a real, big and growling bear, he quickly learns that sometimes breakfast tastes best when it doesn't have any teeth

This dual language edition includes both the original English text and an Algonquin translation.

This story was inspired by Donovan, a first-grader in in La Loche, a community in northern Saskatchewan that Robert Munsch visited in January, 1990. When Robert asked what the kids liked to eat, Donovan said that he liked to eat BEAR Illustrator Jay Odjick is a member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation and the creator of the Algonquin Word of the Day series.

Telling stories is what Robert Munsch does -- and loves best. From the first time he stood in front of a group of children as a student teacher at a nursery school in 1972, his jaunty, animated presentation grabbed hold of the imaginations of his listeners and he hasn't let go since.

Before he puts a story to paper, Munsch spends up to three years telling, revising and fine-tuning the tale in front of his rapt audiences. "I figured out once that the stories the kids kept requesting came to two percent of my total output," he says. But once he discovered how to capture the spontaneity of his narratives in written form, he was on his way to being a successful and sought-after author.

Munsch has published dozens of books in both Canada and the United States. His first efforts, Mud Puddle and The Dark, were published in 1979 and the runaway bestseller Love You Forever was first published in 1986. All of his characters are believably spunky, stubborn and endearing children, while his story lines tend to challenge conventions and stereotypes.

Munsch describes his stories as "middle of the road taboo." When he uses words like pee and underwear, "the kids go absolutely bananas." As for the parents, "Eighty percent think it's really neat; the other twenty percent ask, 'How could you?'"

Robert Munsch lives in Ontario, Canada, and continues to perform his own tales -- often without advance notice -- for day care centers, schools, and libraries. Visit him at www.robertmunsch.com