Cybils Award-winning author Laura Amy Schlitz crafts a masterful interpretation of one of the Grimm Brothers' most engrossing fairy tales. A cold and hungry soldier is returning from war. He has no money, so he makes a pact with the devil. If he can wear a bearskin for seven years, he will always have plenty of gold. But if he tells anyone of the pact, he will lose his soul. 'It's an unabashedly old-fashioned retelling, making few concessions to modern sensibilities; as such, it carries a power rarely found in fairy-tale retellings/.'-Kirkus Reviews