This book was published 1996 by Boyds Mills Press .

Born in Kasauli (Himachal Pradesh) in 1934, Ruskin Bond grew up in Jamnagar (Gujarat), Dehradun, New Delhi and Simla. His first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written over 500 short stories, essays and novellas (including Vagrants in the Valley and A Flight of Pigeons) and more than forty books for children. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India in 1993, the Padma Shri in 1999, and the Delhi government's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. He lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his extended family. Ruth Eitzen was a lifelong peace activist as well as a children's book author. She and her husband, Allan, led literacy workshops in Nepal and in her home town of Barto, Pennsylvania. She died in 2007. Allan Eitzen is the illustrator of a number of children's books.