All Alone

All Alone is a children's book by the American writer Claire Huchet Bishop, published in 1953 and illustrated by Feodor Rojankovsky. The Newbery committee named it a runner-up that year.

Marcel Mabout is ten, and his father sends him up to the summer pasture in the French mountains with the family's three cows, which is the first time he has been trusted with the family fortune. He carries with him the creed the village lives by, mind your own business, a rule that has turned the place into a collection of strangers rather than a community of neighbours.

In the mountains Marcel faces cold, fear and loneliness that he was not prepared for. Then he hears the yodelling of Pierre Pascal, a slightly older cowherd on a neighbouring mountain, and the two of them begin yodelling to each other across the gap. When Pierre's cows stray onto Marcel's mountain, he has to choose between the rule he was raised on and his own sense of what is right, and the choice he makes sets off a change in the village.