Telling time: 30 seconds
Suitability: 11 years and up

Collected by Michael Taft
Informant: Katherine Wood

Mistaking a large mosquito for an airplane will be a familiar joke to many in northern and western Canada. W.O. Mitchell tells a similar story about a grasshopper in Jake and the Kid.

There was a trapper at Fort Nelson. And he got up one morning and he found a mosquito trying on his socks. They say that when the American Army first came to Whitehorse, they had planes coming through that were refuelling. They had five hundred gallons pumped into a mosquito before they found it wasn't a plane.

-- from "Large Mosquitoes I" originally printed in Tall Tales of British Columbia by Michael Taft, copyright © 1983 Provincial Archives of British Columbia.

A companion volume to Storytellers' Rendezvous (CLA, 1979) and Storytellers' Encore (CLA, 1984), previously compiled by Irene Aubrey, Louise McDiarmid, and Lorrie Andersen, Share a Tale offers 103 stories and poems which are to be shared not just with the children's audience of the earlier volumes, but also with young adults, a young adult being defined as someone over 14. The present compilers, both experience children's librarians and storytellers, have included a fine introduction which cleary lays out how the new book differs from its predecessors; in addition to aiming fora broader audience, the compilers have used slightly different categories and included a new section, "Tall Tales," which inclues history, biography, and reminiscenses.