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readallthenewberys2012-10-20 12:00 am
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2012-10-20 12:00 am
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Newbery Medal: Smoky the Cow Horse (Will James)
Okay, I decided not to run the Mock Newberys of the Past strictly in step with the Newberys. Which allows for more flexibility in plugging in good books as I discover them! So, YAY.
So anyway: the next Proper Newbery Nominee on this list is Smoky the Cow Horse, the 1927 winner. In googling to un-confuse myself over the similar names "Will James" (this book's author) and "Will Rogers" (not this book's author), I learned that Will James was apparently the pen name of a Canadian cowboy, real name Joseph Ernest Nephtali Dufault.
* ...I'm just gonna quote the first paragraph of this book word-for-word. "To my way of thinking there's something wrong, or missing, with any person who hasn't got a soft spot in their heart for an animal of some kind. With most folks the dog stands highest as man's friend, then comes the horse, with others the cat is liked best as a pet, or a monkey is fussed over; but whatever kind of animal it is a person likes, it's all hunkydory so long as there's a place in the heart for one or a few of them."
Mr James continues in this vein, and I suddenly see why Zane Grey was considered such a good horse-opera writer, besides being massively prolific. He was WAY BETTER THAN THIS. ;P I mean, no offense to Mr James-formerly-Dufault, who Wikipedia assures me was Francophone by birth; learning a new language is tricky, and writing good literature in it is trickier yet! I'm just... trying to decide whether to be mildly shocked or not-so-mildly offended... at the Newbery committee, who (if I have learned ANYTHING about their taste in literature during the 1920s) did actually think this was seriously the best tone in which to write A Children's Book.
* "A good horse always packs a good man"... oh, sentimental drivel, how I loathe you. I can totally see why the copyright page opposite this preface informs me of a 1954 reprint, though. *will always mock the 1950s, sorry* (I'm less sure why there's a fax number for the publishing company below it. Doesn't that make this particular edition an '80s-ish reprint? ...oh Newbery committee, inflicting SO MANY BAD BOOKS on the generations after you. And possibly mediocre books - I don't know yet! ;P)
* What on earth does "gazabo" mean when used as an insult? - ah, it's an old slang term for man or boy, also a corruption of gazebo. I'm guessing the missing link here is the use of "gazebo" (pronounced "gaze-boh") as a comical name for a face, i.e. something one looks out of, which I know because my mom got it from her dad. :-)
* The spelling. "Figger", "crethure" (for creature)... much as it pains me to say it, I do agree with Emily Post on this particular matter. Do NOT leave random misspellings in "to add character", O editors of the world. If a book doesn't sound cowboy enough when spelled properly, it is not well-written. (I say this, admittedly, as someone who used to own and cherish a novel-length Paul Bunyan retelling done entirely in backwoods dialect - but it was comprehensive! ;P The information it contained outweighed the gabble. This... isn't, so far.)
* Now we get into the book proper; chapter one, "A Range Colt". I'm going to do one-entry-per-chapter just because I do not think I will get through this otherwise, and I really want to give it a fair chance. *tries to remember the mindset of the horse-crazy youngster who would have been a much better audience for this book*
* Okay, once he gets into the fiction writing and especially the description, he does pull it off a bit better. Some kind editor should have taken off that preface for him, because this riveting six-page account (I do mean riveting literally, not sarcastically) of wee baby Smoky learning to stand up would have been a much better way to start off the book. Will James has a fascinating knack for description and pacing, a good eye, and it's easier to skim over the caowboyy dialect and punctuation when the content's interesting - which it is. CUTE BABY HORSIE. ;-)
* I take this short break to quote you something funny: "The rest of that day [the day he's born] was full of events for Smoky, he explored the whole country, went up big mountains two feet high, wide valleys six or eight feet acrost and at one time was as far as twelve feet away from his mammy all by himself." I do side-eye the consistent use of "mammy" as the term for Smoky's mother, but I don't really know if that term was as specifically associated with Black women as it is today, or if it was still a perfectly acceptable word for anyone's mother. Anyway, my point is, I AM ENJOYING THIS WRITING.
* I note, because noting ingrained racism is something I'm doing a lot in these liveblogs, that the awesome description of a night sky out West might have been better without "and the braves was a chasing the buffalo plum around the Big Dipper, the water hole of The Happy Hunting Grounds", but... eh. One thing about this well-done actual-cowboy writing style, I'm a little more inclined to cut him slack on things that are more actual-cowboy things to say, even though he was born in 1892 and is thus definitely guilty of getting his references to non-reservation-living Native Americans out of books. :P
* As far as I can figure, these charcoal illustrations are also by Mr Will James, whom Wikipedia bills as primarily an artist. If that's so, he's GOOD; I've never seen a running colt drawn from that angle, and it's very confusing but totally realistic and proportional. :D
* Ooh, and now it's the next day and Smoky is exploring his surroundings some more, and there is a COYOTE. Well, "cayote" viz. Mr Will James. It is being a very interesting informational sort of book, speaking from the POV of the age-range it's aimed at (as far as I can remember that POV), and definitely more accurate and less sentimental than I feared.
* The coyote is defeated and sent on its way with only a bit of a nip on one of Smoky's legs to show for it. A few days later, Smoky and his mother catch up with their herd, commanded by a big aged saddle-horse put out to pasture...
* ...oh, we're getting a little essay on how Smoky's mum has no time to play with him because she's busy staying in shape to produce plenty of milk for him. So the (male) saddle-horse is the one who plays with Smoky and looks after him and teaches him the ropes a bit. (Metaphorical ropes. We haven't encountered any humans yet in this story, with or without ropes.)
* Okay, but that lasts only as long as Smoky is the newest baby horse in the herd, which is a couple of weeks; after that, he's just one of the foals and plays around with all of them, and goes exploring and so forth.
* OHOHO Smoky met a porcupine! He didn't get very hurt, just a few quills in his nose - we do have a taaaaad bit of the "our protagonist is extremely lucky in order to Encounter all these Potential Disasters without getting seriously hurt like so many other wossnames in the same position do", which is so common in baby-animal stories (I remember reading one about a baby octopus once, WOW), but it's not too unrealistic.
* Now Smoky has met a calf, and this is the end of the chapter. Chapter 2 is "Smoky Meets the Human", which is... direct. ;-)
* Oo-er. It is high summer now, and Smoky starts out by meeting A BEAR. Well, a bear cub first - which he follows, being curious - and then a mama bear which roars at him and he RUNS AWAY FAST.
* Smoky's mother teaches him how to run away from rattlesnakes, and he learns about most of the other animals of the West, except wolves and mountain lions; James acknowledges that if wee curious baby Smoky had met either of those he probably wouldn't have survived to have a story written about him, but the herd was careful and kept watch out for those. I take it back about the sentimental drivel, sir; you really could have used a better editor, but you're hitting pretty much Cedric the Forester levels of un-soppy realism.
* A cowboy comes and rounds up the herd and drives them into a corral, and picks out one of the other horses for breaking (Smoky's four months old, not old enough to ride yet). Hee, and here's a description from Smoky's POV of the cowboy lighting a cigarette - I would have loved this book as an eight-or-ten-year-old. The level of detail and description is really amazingly well-handled.
* Ooh, and Smoky is branded... oh, liar, liar. "[I]t felt cool and there was no pain, for he was at the stage where the searing iron was no worse than a touch from the human hand." What on earth do you even mean by that, sir? LIAR, I CALL LIAR. :P
* Anyway, then Smoky and the herd are let loose again, and they have their first prairie winter, and then in the spring Smoky's mother has another foal, and that ends this chapter. (It's longer than it sounds; I'm just enjoying a lot of it and not making too many notes on it. I'm already forty pages in.)
* Now it's Smoky's next summer, he's a yearling, and the herd is on the move; the mountain trail forks, Smoky wanders off on the wrong path from the rest of the herd, and HE MEETS A MOUNTAIN LION. Happily, he's saved by a rattlesnake buzzing and setting him running off just before the cougar pounces! O_O
* Oh, I say! The author gets to use "as if the devil was after 'em", and then remarks that "devil" might be too mild a name for the mountain lion. Curse words are apparently no obstacle to winning a Newbery in 1927. Might we be seeing the beginning of a lean toward realism instead of soapsuds already?
(I do note the ubiquitous characterization of herbivores = good, carnivores = bad, which tends to crop up in animal stories, but OH WELL. ;P)
* Hee, Smoky as a yearling and a two-year-old is an ornery little horse-teenage cuss. We skim over that pretty quickly, but with enough detail that it doesn't feel like a sudden jump in the narrative, just a proper elision of stuff that's already been told once.
* "There was so much life wrapped up in that pony's hide that it was mighty hard for him to settle down and behave, and even as a three year old he sometimes had to bust out and do things that wasn't at all proper and which made the old horses set their ears back and show their teeth." You know, this is... I'm not quite sure what to say about it, because there are good arguments on both sides, but one side is that portraying your protagonist as so spirited and awesome he just HAS to make trouble is kind of a bad idea in a kids' book, because kids of the same relative age - six, eight, ten, twelve - are likely to take it as permission to be ornery and cause trouble and laugh off consequences, because they're the most special and lively kids they know, and they're just showing how awesome they are. I know I did. (We're going to get a bit of depiction-without-judgment of that same belief when we hit Beverly Cleary's Ramona and Her Father, which I am muchly looking forward to.)
I mean, I know it's a reaction against the Sunday-school "moral tales" that Louisa May Alcott wrote against, but surely there's got to be a middle ground, a way to portray active and occasionally troublesome kids neither as devils to be eaten by monsters nor as special and important people who have a RIGHT to waltz around making trouble with their "Ooh, look, I'm so high-spirited!" (This has been me, I know what I'm talking about. *g*)
* Uhhh, Mr James, either you've carefully skipped over another round-up or I don't think Smoky is a gelding (warning: gory images at link) just yet. It doesn't mean "younger horse than a stallion", you know. (I'd not put it past him to have skipped a round-up - we are still dealing with 1926-1927 mores here - but I'm just mentioning.) Also, you were JUST talking about how Smoky's learned to fight with other "studs" with reference to "appropriating mares". Make up your mind?
* So anyway, a big black stallion steals the old buckskin saddle-horse's herd of mares, and Smoky and the buckskin form a little bachelor herd and browse around for a while.
* BWAHAHAHAHAHA. Sorry, Mr James - *points and laughs* He's just so utterly ignoring the buckskin's main reason for wanting to find another herd of mares to take on, in favor of this epic line of epic weirdness: "All would be hunkydory again for the buckskin if he could find another bunch to run with where there was mares and little colts. He had a mighty strong failing for the little fellers and most any bunch would do if there was only a few of them in". Wooooooow. (Smoky, in contrast, wants his mom and his year-mates back.)
* Smoky helps the buckskin steal a herd of mares and colts from a young chestnut, and then gets to tag along with that herd for the whole summer, so maybe he is a gelding after all, as Will James is now saying again. (Smoky's four years old now, which istr is adult for a horse.) Then Smoky takes a wrong fork in the trail again on the way to winter pastures... but winds up going back to winter with the buckskin's herd. If Smoky gets a lady-friend or so after all this telegraphing of him definitely being a gelding, I'm going to be CONFUSED. O_O
* New chapter! "The End of a Rope". And back in the first chapter the narrator remarked that Smoky would get his name when he was four years old, so I assume he's going to get rounded up for good pretty soon.
* Ooh. It's a bad winter, the stockmen didn't have enough hay to put out (the narrator throws in a remark that they'd done as much as they could), and eventually the cattle and horses start dying from lack of food. Then the wolves begin to move in.
* Smoky and the buckskin lead their herd away, running from the wolves, but eventually Smoky - still curious - drops back a little to see what the wolves are actually about, and... doesn't get eaten. :-) Instead, he winds up leading the wolves away from the herd for a while, which gives the herd a rest, and then when the wolves decide Smoky is too active to bother fighting with, he follows them right back.
* Uhhhh. The buckskin has been harrying some small foals at the rear of the herd to make them keep up with the rest, away from the wolves; "of course the little fellers' mammies would of fought for 'em too but they was at the stage where they felt every horse was for himself, they'd scared into a stampede and was all a running for their own lives." I DISAPPROVE, SIR. Stop with this making the boy horses always the most awesome and interesting of the lot.
* Okay, so Smoky and the buckskin between them save the herd from the wolves. Then the next spring, some cowboys come and round up the herd and cut out just the four-year-olds, including Smoky, and start them to being broken. Beginning of chapter five, "The Bronc Twister Steps Up".
* We have a human with a name! The "bronc twister" is named Clint. I reserve the right to imagine him as being played by Jeremy Renner till further notice. ;-)
* Clint is thirty, and has been "twisting" or breaking broncs since he was a teenager; he's getting old for the job, now. But we have half a page explaining that any good cowboy would rather ride a horse that's been treated well and has some spirit, than a sad and leg-weary one, even if riding the more spirited horses wears the cowboy down faster and leads him to an early grave.
* MISTER JAMES. This entire page is about how Clint feels "sort of married to them ponies" and is sad when he has to turn each lot over to the other cowboys for further training, and says "Some day I'm going to meet a horse I'll really get married to, and then there'll be things a popping." SIR PLEASE JUST WHAAAAAAAAAT. O_O Words! They do not mean what you think they mean!
* Oh, Clint, this is not professional. Will James, this is not good writing. Clint feels Smoky to be the kind of horse "he'd steal if he couldn't buy, and if he could neither steal nor buy he'd work for", and then decides that if anyone else tries to take Smoky for THEIR horse, that he'll rather make an outlaw (an unbreakable, unridable horse) of Smoky than let him be anyone else's. YOUR ETHICS, SIR.
* At least Mr James does call it out, "That was no way for Clint to feel maybe" etc, but excuses him on grounds that "that feeling was past skin deep with him". I just don't know! o_O
* So Clint takes special care and trains Smoky a lot more carefully than he does the other horses (though he isn't sloppy with them), and uses his free time for the training so that he doesn't feel like he's wasting company money paying him to train his own horse. Mr James seems in two minds here - Clint says again that it'll be bad enough if he has to steal Smoky, but the narrator follows it up with the assertion that "Of course Clint couldn't steal that horse or no other one". Hmmm. I think he's having some trouble balancing the realistic feelings of the character with the obligation of a 1920s author to throw in a bit of moral high ground... especially as Wiki tells me Will James himself was jailed for cattle rustling at one point, and at another point changed his name from Joseph Dufault to evade another charge. ;-)
* Anyway, here's a really long interesting clear passage on how Smoky is broken to saddle, and almost three pages about how "breaking" a horse IS NOT breaking its spirit but just schooling it - how a person that's going to break a horse has to be gentle but consistent with it, and teach it carefully about ropes and saddles and so forth. It's obvious that Will James feels just as strongly about this stuff as Dr Dolittle (and presumably Hugh Lofting) did about bullfighting and the caging of big cats in zoos.
* The breaking Smoky to saddle continues into the next chapter, still with all this careful explanation of the best method and how it works from Smoky's point of view.
* THESE ARE THE BEST ILLUSTRATIONS OKAY, and I've seen some horse-book illustrations, I have. Will James, if it's him that's doing these drawings, can draw a horse in action MOST AMAZINGLY.
* He's really excellent with pacing - I'm on page 121, where I find this remark: "All that took time, and the cowboy learned him only one thing each day, sometimes very little of that one thing,--but as the days went by it all accumulated to a lot." It has taken time! I'm two-fifths of the way through the book and we're still on four-year-old Smoky being broken to saddle... but Will James is a REALLY EXCELLENT WRITER; there hasn't been a single spot where I've felt the book was bogging down. It's well on a par with Black Beauty, so far, as a horse book.
* Hmmm. We get into chapter seven, "Smoky Shows His Feelings", and here's another named human character - "Jeff Nicks, cow foreman of the Rocking R outfit" (that being the ranch that branded Smoky as a foal).
* Okay, Jeff sees from a distance a horse dragging something, so he rides down to check what's wrong; it's Smoky, who seems to be half-dragging half-carrying a rider who's hanging on to the saddle horn from the wrong side. Then Jeff rides a bit closer and sees that he's not dragging Clint (the rider is Clint, of course) but helping him along, because Clint seems to be hurt. After a while, Smoky finds a rock and lets Clint get up into the saddle, where Clint passes out. Smoky brings him home to the corral, but is shy of Jeff, because Clint's the only human Smoky knows as a friend.
* Clint manages to wake up enough to slide off of Smoky near the fence, so that Jeff can drag him out under the rails. Jeff brings Clint into the bunkhouse and tucks him up and gives him some broth; after he's rested, Clint requests that Jeff go take Smoky's saddle off and put him on a picket rope, but Jeff doesn't think Smoky is gentled except to Clint's handling, and refuses. Smoky doesn't mind being left overnight because he's worried about Clint; as Jeff puts it, "a fretting his head that I'm going to eat you up".
* I like the tone of this book; it's very much to horses as Albert Payson Terhune is to dogs, portraying them as very smart but not magically, unrealistically so. (Yes, I grew up on a load of Terhune books.)
* Anyway, the next day Clint manages to go out and unsaddle Smoky and put him to feed, and then he explains to Jeff what happened, which is that Clint messed up a bit in roping a cow for Smoky's practice, and the cow managed rather awkwardly to throw both man and horse. Clint says he intends to give up bronc-busting, because he recognizes the same "ailing" that he picked up a few years back while breaking an ornery horse, and doesn't want to be permanently disabled.
* So Clint requests to be allowed to become a standard cowboy with the company, and to get to keep Smoky as one of the horses in his "string" of mounts as long as he's working for that company. Jeff - who rather wants Smoky himself because apparently Smoky is a super-awesome horse (this has been properly foreshadowed, I just didn't drag it in) - hems and haws for a page or two, calls out Clint on holding Smoky back when the cowboys came by a month ago to collect *pointedly* ALL the broncs Clint had got ready for saddle in that time... but eventually Jeff says Smoky is obviously a one-man horse and as long as Jeff's bossing the outfit, Clint can have Smoky in his string.
* In a month, Clint is well enough to ride if Smoky doesn't buck for him - which Smoky doesn't. So they head out to the main camp of the ranching outfit just in time for the big fall roundup, which will start in the next chapter.
* A few days into the roundup (and about twenty pages of good well-handled storytelling description further on), Clint finally picks out Smoky to take out on the day's actual roundup ride, called a "circle". Smoky's feeling chipper and bucks all over the place for fun, but Clint's well enough to handle it by this time.
* After which Smoky gets to feeling that he's an experienced cow-horse - which he isn't, but he's getting there. The roundup goes on, and eventually Smoky is allowed to help manage the big herd of cows that have been rounded up. Have I mentioned this is a really well-written book, if one makes allowances for the cowboy language? BECAUSE IT IS. This whole chapter is about how Smoky starts learning to be a proper team cowhorse but is still Clint's favorite and Clint is his favorite too. And it's really well-handled, well-paced, and I'm getting fairly used to the cowboy spelling and language, because Will James knows what he's doing with it; it isn't put on for fake.
* The next chapter, over the winter, Smoky and his little brother Pecos (who was re-introduced earlier but I didn't mention him) have a big fight with a mean black horse. Other than that it's a good winter, plenty of food and shelter, and the next spring Clint is the first cowboy to round up Smoky's group of horses. Smoky doesn't remember him at first, but once the horses are corralled, Clint talks to him a while till Smoky starts to remember, and eventually makes friends with him again. :D
* Another year goes by, in which Smoky learns a lot and becomes a Proper Cow Horse. Except he still bucks some every time he's ridden.
* Clint doesn't mind the bucking, though, because... oh lol. OH LOL.
* Okay, the other book I'm working on for this year, the Mock Newbery? The title character is named Tom Jarvis. The superintendent and part-owner of this ranch, who has an eye for a good horse and notices Smoky now at fall roundup, is also named Tom Jarvis. O_O Who'd'a thunk?!
* So - apparently it's considered rude to ask a cowboy to swap one of his horses out of his string, and is the Old West version of a pink slip; but "Old Tom" here wants Smoky enough to do it anyway. But Clint doesn't want to leave Smoky behind, so he jibes Tom into trying to saddle and ride Smoky, and into being angry while he tries it.
* Of course Smoky bucks Tom off, twice, and before Tom can try the third time, Jeff Nicks tries to talk him out of it by saying Smoky "bucks every time he's rode". So Tom - who used to be better at riding a bronc but is in his forties or fifties and can't handle it anymore - gets extremely mad and fires Clint on the spot, saying he'll get someone else to make Smoky stop bucking. Jeff speaks up to the effect that hiring and firing is HIS business, not Tom's... and gets fired for it as well!
* But when Jeff and Clint come up to the ranch house to get their pay, Tom is already cooled down and thinking he'd better try to smooth things over, so when Jeff remarks that all the riders on the outfit want to quit as well if Jeff is let go, Tom offers to re-hire Jeff - and then agrees that Clint was never really fired, so it's fine for Clint to stick around too. Tom even asserts that he'll never try to take Smoky from Clint again. :D
* Another year goes by, and another, up until Smoky has done five years as a Rocking R cowhorse. Most of the other cowboys and horses have left and been replaced in that time, but Jeff and Clint and a few other old hands are still with the Rocking R.
* New word! Most of the other cowboys had "went and throwed their soogans on some other outfit's wagons."
* So Smoky has been Clint's horse all this time, nobody else riding or saddling him since Old Tom tried, and he's become an awesome cow-horse. There's one story Clint and the others especially like to tell about how awesome he is, which Will James is now going to tell me. "It was only an average of the others that happened, but there was something about that one which made the telling easier as to the wonders of that horse. It was the detail that counted there." WHICH IS THIS ENTIRE BOOK IN A NUTSHELL, good on you sir for writing your own best blurb so properly. ;D
* Here is the story: There's a big steer that they have to rope in order to cut off one of its horns, which is growing crooked and going to poke out its eye. Clint gets the steer roped around the neck, but then the front cinch of his saddle breaks and Clint flies off. The saddle's half off of Smoky, who could buck out of it easily enough, but instead he bucks himself back into it and then stops the steer as perfectly as if he had a rider telling him what to do. :D
* So Smoky starts getting a reputation across the West, and other ranches start offering to buy him, till the price gets up to eight times the going price for a cowhorse - but even then, Old Tom tells Clint he won't sell Smoky off unless he needed the money to pull the ranch through a bad winter or some such thing.
* Naturally the next winter is a bad one. Okay, let's see what happens. ^_^
* Clint sees it's going to be a hard winter with little feed for the horses, and makes a note to go and check on Smoky after a while, but he doesn't get out there for over a month because the first blizzard is so bad - it covers up all the prairie grass with packed snow - and he's kept so busy bringing in more and more cattle to be fed.
* After a while, he does get out there and spot Smoky, who's still in okay condition (enough to run away, anyway) but getting thin. Clint wants to bring Smoky in for the winter to be safe, but he finds two stray cows with newborn winter calves that he has to save, so he leaves Smoky out away. This chapter's title is "Among the Missing", so I'm a bit worried. ;P
* Another blizzard does scour off some of the packed snow down to just a few inches thick, so that the livestock can paw through for food, and that's what saves their lives that winter, because the ranch can't feed them all on bought hay. So Smoky, we're assured, is doing fine - but Clint can't get back out to check on him.
* So eventually another rider comes and rustles away Smoky's little herd of cowhorses, and drives them off through a snowstorm through which they won't be tracked. This rider is described thus, while he's sleeping in a sheltered camp: "All of him, from the toe of his gunny sack covered boots to the dark face which showed under the wore out black hat, pointed out as the man being a half-breed of Mexican and other blood that's darker, [I legit don't know if he means Native American or Black] and noticing the cheap, wore out saddle, the ragged saddle-blanket on a horse that should of had some chance to feed instead of being tied up, showed that he was a halfbreed from the bad side, not caring, and with no pride."
Which... uh. Hm. That's... annoying. Not as bad as it could be? But bad enough. :P I mean, thankfully, he does allow for the existence of half-breeds "from the good side", whatever that might be - and for all I know, there might have been some kind of cultural thing going on where mixed-race people WERE a bit more likely to be sloppy troublemakers, being already outcasts from both sides of their ancestry, as it were. Descriptive rather than prescriptive racism, maybe. Still, as this is the first person of color to turn up in the story, it's bad. :P
* This rustler is referred to in the book simply as "the breed". Trying to think of a better name to call him, I think I'll just go with "the rustler".
* The rustler tries to rope Smoky for a fresh riding horse, but misses his throw in the dark and ropes in a different horse instead. He says he'll get Smoky next time.
* We return to Clint, who couldn't get back out to find Smoky for a while, and when he finally does get out there, obviously can't find Smoky. He gets worried, looks around every time he can get away, and finally concludes that Smoky's whole little "bunch" of horses has been stolen. Old Tom isn't much worried when Clint tells him this, but asserts Smoky etc have just wandered off and they'll find 'em at spring roundup.
* But after spring roundup, Smoky still is not found, and after a few days Old Tom decides he really has been stolen and reports the same to the sheriff. A reward is put out, $1000 for the thief, the same for the horses, and Smoky being described specially.
* No sign of Smoky is found all that year, and after fall roundup, Clint gets ready to leave the Rocking R. At this point we return to Smoky, who's a few hundred miles south in Arizona.
* The last time we saw Smoky, the rustler had said he'd catch him the next day to ride. But Smoky has learned to dodge a rope, from the rustler missing him that one time, and so he keeps dodging till the rustler outwits him by pretending to throw the rope, waiting till he's stopped dodging, and then throwing it for real. Then the rustler ties him up to a post and beats him with a branch, till Smoky finally breaks free from the rope as the branch is getting ready to snap. So the rustler gives up and catches a not-ornery horse to ride that day.
* Will James explains that Smoky has always hated and feared humans by instinct, except Clint managed to befriend him, but he's never been VICIOUS toward humans till this rustler came along and beat him. Now Smoky wants to kill the rustler. There's a lot of... well, it reads to me as harping on the man's skin color, but given Will James's fondness for epithets anyway, it could just be an ill-chosen descriptor like "the red-haired man" - OR it could be one of the main things that Smoky can tell the man from other humans by, given that he probably hasn't seen a lot of dark-skinned people on the Rocking R, which is stated to be near a thousand miles north of the Arizona area where Smoky winds up being kept.
* Smoky and the rustler carry on their mutual hating of each other's guts till Smoky eventually escapes the rustler's corral and runs wild. (*sigh* Will James, I do not appreciate that the first person who's taken a well-deserved and instant dislike to anyone in this book is a random white cowboy who doesn't know Smoky etc are rustled, taking a dislike to the mixed-race rustler. :P)
* But in the fall, the same fall where Clint's getting ready to leave the Rocking R, the rustler sets up a trap corral and a string of relay horses, and catches Smoky again.
* Oh, oh, oh. :-( Smoky gets more and more... I'm going to say depressed here... and seems likely to die, not even caring when the rustler rides him and whips him and spurs him, till one day he goes a little too far, stirs Smoky to buck a little at him, and tries to beat the last bit of spirit out of Smoky.
"From that day on Smoky's heart began to expand towards natural size once more-- But it wasn't the same kind of heart that had once been his,--that first one had died, and this one had took root from abuse, growed from rough treatment to full size, and with hankerings in it only for finding and destroying all that wasn't to his liking. And there was nothing to his liking no more." Ow. Ow, ow, ow. Mr Will James, HOW DO YOU KNOW SO EXACTLY what does happen to an animal - or a person - that's constantly abused for too long? :P Ouch.
* So one day the rustler takes Smoky out for a long ride to try and break him enough to sell him for a good price as the excellent cowhorse he used to be - but he pushes a little too hard, and Smoky throws him and (it's implied) kills him before the rustler can shoot Smoky dead.
* Next chapter: "When the Good Leaves". We hear of a bucking horse, and of a reward offered to any man in the country who can ride him. He's nicknamed "The Cougar" for his ferocity and viciousness.
* OH THANK YOU WILL JAMES. You restore my faith in your writerliness. "The Cougar", formerly Smoky (obvs), "seemed to hate some humans worse than others,--his hate was plainest for the face that showed dark." SO YOU DID HAVE A REASON for harping so much on the rustler's dark skin. I will even go so far as to say that it was a good choice, as Smoky would have seen any other likely distinguishing feature before on harmless men - hair color or build or a certain habitual kind of clothing - but wouldn't likely have seen a cowboy as brown-skinned as this half-Mexican half-Black rustler, and therefore associates that skin color with being beaten and abused. And your note about "a half-breed from the BAD side" shows, I think, a bit of goodwill / not trying to generalize about race. (Still not un-racist enough unless you actually SHOW us one or more likeable dark-skinned people, but I will give you credit where it's due.)
* THESE ARE ALL OF THE BEST DRAWINGS. You know the classic pose of a bucking horse? These aren't it. Every one of these drawings of any horse is a different pose, from an unusual angle, clearly done by a man who knew horses and was drawing the trickiest, most twisted-up bucking poses he could think of, all perfectly.
* Smoky puts in two years as The Cougar, being owned by a rodeo as a specialty bucking horse, and becomes something of a celebrity in a wrestling-star kind of way. Then there comes a freckle-faced hotshot kid who's pretty sure he can ride anything that stands; he hangs on longer than most riders, but then comes near getting killed and is only saved because Smoky accidentally throws him over the fence of the rodeo ring and can't trample him. From that time on, he goes to each rodeo he can get to where The Cougar is ridden, and keeps trying to figure him out in hopes of riding him to a standstill.
* Three more years go past, and then one more year draws toward fall, and "a cowboy from the Wyoming country, who'd come south for the winter" signs up for the bucking-bronc rounds of which the Cougar is the championship match. This cowboy manages to ride The Cougar for ten seconds - the standard length of time required to "win" a bronc ride. Everyone is astonished, but someone notes that maybe The Cougar is finally beginning to slow down a bit... which, given that Smoky is now what, fifteen years old? isn't that surprising.
* Indeed - the freckle-face is the next person to ride The Cougar for ten seconds, and by the end of the year's last rodeo, The Cougar has been ridden four times in all, once to a standstill. And he doesn't seem quite as murderous as he used to be.
* This is not actually, the narrator explains, because Smoky is slowing down; he's just getting over the worst of the hatred he got from the rustler, after being well-treated for five years and never beaten or struck in that time. "The heart of The Cougar was shriveling up and leaving space for the heart that was Smoky's, and that heart, even tho older and weaker was making a mighty strong stand, and steady coming back." OH. OH. OH YOU. *howwwww* This writer, people.
* Hee! Okay, the day comes when Smoky is let out of the chute and just doesn't buck at all, but runs across the fairgrounds on a lope. And here is the next paragraph: "The crowd was disappointed, they felt they wasn't getting their money's worth, and there was hollers of 'take him away and hook him up on a milk wagon,' or 'sell him for a lady's saddle horse,' and so on.--It was queer, but only natural, to notice that them loud mouth remarks was passed only by the most useless, and of the kind that's plum helpless whenever away from their home grounds. Others hollered more to kind of show off, but the looks they'd get from the sensible folks around only went to prove that the show off was of just plain ignorance." YOU TELL 'EM, BUSTER. :D
* That rider turns Smoky loose at the other side of the grounds, and the rodeo people sell him to the livery stable before they leave town with their new star bucker (who was introduced earlier) and the other horses.
* The livery stable owner planned to break Smoky to harness and hire him out to pull carriages, but before that happens, a group of tourists come to town and want to go horse-riding. So the owner tries Smoky with a saddle, and Smoky doesn't buck at all; so he hires him out. He doesn't want to say this is "The Cougar", the famous bucking horse, so he renames him "Cloudy".
* Cloudy becomes a popular livery horse in town, and the author spends several well-filled pages ripping into how badly people treat a rental horse - very Black Beauty, if a little less... Dickensian!activist in tone. "The boys, girls, and grown ups kept a setting on the old horse, and not knowing, but sure and steady was riding and dragging him down to a death that'd be away ahead of the time when it should come-- They'd compared well with a pack of wolves, for like that kind, none of 'em would ever wanted to come within a hundred yards of the horse when he was up and a fighting." Oh, give it to 'em, sir. Tell 'em off! :D
* Winter comes just in time to save "Cloudy" from dying of overwork, even though the livery owner feeds him okay and tries to take good care of him - short of giving him time off to rest, which he can't afford.
* The next year, an old gentleman who rides for exercise and a young lady who loves horses both ask if they can ride Cloudy every day, so the livery owner lets him take just those two, which is much easier on him than the kind of racing the boys who'd rent him formerly used to do. But even so, he's getting very old and stiff, and it's hard for him even to walk out with his two regular riders, who both treat him very well.
* Aw. "If [the young lady] knowed that lumps of sugar wasn't the best thing there is to feed to a horse, she'd filled her pockets with a handful or so of grain instead, or something that's more fitting to a horse's stomach that way, but she didn't know, and she sure meant well." PREACH IT, BROTHER. I love these books that have a fair dose of authorial speechifying about something they really care about.
* One spring day, Cloudy goes out with his young lady rider on his back, and he wants to run. So she lets him, because the livery owner told her it'd be good for him to run short distances if he wanted. But he runs miles and miles, and she doesn't notice he's getting tired because he doesn't balk or slow down - he could well run himself to death, except they come to a spot where the trail's washed out, and she has to stop and then notices how badly he's panting and sweaty and all shaking.
* She thinks Cloudy is going to die of heatstroke, so she takes him into the stream and cools him down, and then brings him back home real slow, but he's still wobbly and stumbling.
* Then when she gets back, the stableman mentions that his new stable boy forgot to give Cloudy any water this morning. So from that time on, Cloudy just isn't fit to be ridden anymore - he's been "foundered", or ridden so hard he can never recover. ...I'm not sure I can finish this book, but there's only a couple dozen pages, so I'll try.
* The livery owner doesn't ask the girl what happened - he can tell - or tell her what she accidentally did, but tries to cheer her up by saying he'll try to doctor Cloudy up to feel a little better, and she comes and helps, buys him liniment and medicine and things... but the author explains exactly what's wrong with Smoky/Cloudy and how he can't get better.
* So one day, the girl comes in to find Cloudy is gone. The livery owner lies to her that he's turned Cloudy loose and that there's good pasture up north a ways where the horse can live free - but there actually isn't any good pasture close enough, and the livery owner, not wanting to let Cloudy starve but unable to feed him anymore, has sold him to be killed for chicken feed.
* One more chapter, called "Dark Clouds, Then Tall Grass".
* Smoky is put in a pasture with the other chicken-feed horses till someone comes and wants to buy some fresh horse meat, at which time whatever horse is the most run down will be shot. But he perks up a little bit, between the doctoring the young lady gave him and the being out in a pasture where he can eat okay and move around as he wants.
* Smoky perks up enough to survive past the other horses, and is kept in stock for an emergency. Finally, though, a wagon-driver comes and trades in his own dying old horse for Cloudy/Smoky - who feels it a disgrace to be put in harness (as does the author, it seems), and tries to run away at first, but once he tires himself out, behaves well enough.
* But the waggoner doesn't treat his horses well; he feeds them musty straw and runs them into the ground, getting a new one every six months or so. He uses them to plow his vegetable garden, then haul the vegetables to market in his wagon, and also do any other hauling jobs he can get.
* At rodeo time, the waggoner is especially busy, sometimes charging various people for jobs he didn't exactly do; and at one particular time, there's Clint the old cowboy with a friend, talking about horses. Clint gets mad at seeing Smoky (whom he doesn't recognize, though he does notice his color and the white "saddle-marks" by his withers) being whipped to make him go, but his friend calms him down and says probably the Humane Society people who hang around the rodeo will notice and get on the waggoner's neck about it. Then they turn to talking about how Old Tom Jarvis of the Rocking R is planning to sell up pretty soon, and how he's sold Clint part of the ranch - the camp where Clint used to break horses for him. Clint plans to stock it with a small herd of cattle.
* Oh, 1920s. :-( I can't tell anything about this waggoner's appearance except he's stated to have black whiskers, but not long after Clint figures out "Cloudy" is Smoky and starts beating up the waggoner for being mean to him, the sheriff (deciding from Smoky's appearance that he's on Clint's side of the altercation) warns him not to tear the waggoner to pieces TOO much because "you know we got to keep record of that kind the same as if it was a white man, and I don't want to be looking all over the streets to find out who he WAS." Which... the way I'm most inclined to take the tone, is that the waggoner is Caucasian but the sheriff figures the best way to insult him is by calling him "not a white man", just like a big compliment back in those days was to say someone was "white clear through". Which is SLIIIIIIGHTLY less bad than if the waggoner WAS actually non-white physically... still and all. *sigh* :P
* Well, Clint buys Smoky and takes him home, and pulls him through the winter - which is a near thing, but he makes it. Then he gets Smoky pretty much to as good a shape as he can be, anymore, but Smoky doesn't seem to remember him at all.
* One spring day, Clint brings in a little bunch of mares and foals, hoping to lift Smoky's spirits... and sure enough, Smoky takes to playing with the little foals like he was a two-year-old again himself. So Clint decides it's for the best to let Smoky go run with the herd and have fun, for however many more years he'll live. So he does that, and Smoky hesitates for a second but then runs off after the other horses. Clint's a bit sad, though, and wonders if Smoky ever will come back or remember him.
* And one more scene - a little later than same year, Smoky comes back and nickers outside the cabin door for Clint. Being well cared for, and then running over the mountains where he was born and lived for his first four years, made him remember. :D
In conclusion: I would call this book pretty solidly the Black Beauty of the USA, maybe even better than that. :-) It's so good and so well-written, I'm waffling on whether to give it five stars even despite the flickers of racism. O_O
So anyway: the next Proper Newbery Nominee on this list is Smoky the Cow Horse, the 1927 winner. In googling to un-confuse myself over the similar names "Will James" (this book's author) and "Will Rogers" (not this book's author), I learned that Will James was apparently the pen name of a Canadian cowboy, real name Joseph Ernest Nephtali Dufault.
* ...I'm just gonna quote the first paragraph of this book word-for-word. "To my way of thinking there's something wrong, or missing, with any person who hasn't got a soft spot in their heart for an animal of some kind. With most folks the dog stands highest as man's friend, then comes the horse, with others the cat is liked best as a pet, or a monkey is fussed over; but whatever kind of animal it is a person likes, it's all hunkydory so long as there's a place in the heart for one or a few of them."
Mr James continues in this vein, and I suddenly see why Zane Grey was considered such a good horse-opera writer, besides being massively prolific. He was WAY BETTER THAN THIS. ;P I mean, no offense to Mr James-formerly-Dufault, who Wikipedia assures me was Francophone by birth; learning a new language is tricky, and writing good literature in it is trickier yet! I'm just... trying to decide whether to be mildly shocked or not-so-mildly offended... at the Newbery committee, who (if I have learned ANYTHING about their taste in literature during the 1920s) did actually think this was seriously the best tone in which to write A Children's Book.
* "A good horse always packs a good man"... oh, sentimental drivel, how I loathe you. I can totally see why the copyright page opposite this preface informs me of a 1954 reprint, though. *will always mock the 1950s, sorry* (I'm less sure why there's a fax number for the publishing company below it. Doesn't that make this particular edition an '80s-ish reprint? ...oh Newbery committee, inflicting SO MANY BAD BOOKS on the generations after you. And possibly mediocre books - I don't know yet! ;P)
* What on earth does "gazabo" mean when used as an insult? - ah, it's an old slang term for man or boy, also a corruption of gazebo. I'm guessing the missing link here is the use of "gazebo" (pronounced "gaze-boh") as a comical name for a face, i.e. something one looks out of, which I know because my mom got it from her dad. :-)
* The spelling. "Figger", "crethure" (for creature)... much as it pains me to say it, I do agree with Emily Post on this particular matter. Do NOT leave random misspellings in "to add character", O editors of the world. If a book doesn't sound cowboy enough when spelled properly, it is not well-written. (I say this, admittedly, as someone who used to own and cherish a novel-length Paul Bunyan retelling done entirely in backwoods dialect - but it was comprehensive! ;P The information it contained outweighed the gabble. This... isn't, so far.)
* Now we get into the book proper; chapter one, "A Range Colt". I'm going to do one-entry-per-chapter just because I do not think I will get through this otherwise, and I really want to give it a fair chance. *tries to remember the mindset of the horse-crazy youngster who would have been a much better audience for this book*
* Okay, once he gets into the fiction writing and especially the description, he does pull it off a bit better. Some kind editor should have taken off that preface for him, because this riveting six-page account (I do mean riveting literally, not sarcastically) of wee baby Smoky learning to stand up would have been a much better way to start off the book. Will James has a fascinating knack for description and pacing, a good eye, and it's easier to skim over the caowboyy dialect and punctuation when the content's interesting - which it is. CUTE BABY HORSIE. ;-)
* I take this short break to quote you something funny: "The rest of that day [the day he's born] was full of events for Smoky, he explored the whole country, went up big mountains two feet high, wide valleys six or eight feet acrost and at one time was as far as twelve feet away from his mammy all by himself." I do side-eye the consistent use of "mammy" as the term for Smoky's mother, but I don't really know if that term was as specifically associated with Black women as it is today, or if it was still a perfectly acceptable word for anyone's mother. Anyway, my point is, I AM ENJOYING THIS WRITING.
* I note, because noting ingrained racism is something I'm doing a lot in these liveblogs, that the awesome description of a night sky out West might have been better without "and the braves was a chasing the buffalo plum around the Big Dipper, the water hole of The Happy Hunting Grounds", but... eh. One thing about this well-done actual-cowboy writing style, I'm a little more inclined to cut him slack on things that are more actual-cowboy things to say, even though he was born in 1892 and is thus definitely guilty of getting his references to non-reservation-living Native Americans out of books. :P
* As far as I can figure, these charcoal illustrations are also by Mr Will James, whom Wikipedia bills as primarily an artist. If that's so, he's GOOD; I've never seen a running colt drawn from that angle, and it's very confusing but totally realistic and proportional. :D
* Ooh, and now it's the next day and Smoky is exploring his surroundings some more, and there is a COYOTE. Well, "cayote" viz. Mr Will James. It is being a very interesting informational sort of book, speaking from the POV of the age-range it's aimed at (as far as I can remember that POV), and definitely more accurate and less sentimental than I feared.
* The coyote is defeated and sent on its way with only a bit of a nip on one of Smoky's legs to show for it. A few days later, Smoky and his mother catch up with their herd, commanded by a big aged saddle-horse put out to pasture...
* ...oh, we're getting a little essay on how Smoky's mum has no time to play with him because she's busy staying in shape to produce plenty of milk for him. So the (male) saddle-horse is the one who plays with Smoky and looks after him and teaches him the ropes a bit. (Metaphorical ropes. We haven't encountered any humans yet in this story, with or without ropes.)
* Okay, but that lasts only as long as Smoky is the newest baby horse in the herd, which is a couple of weeks; after that, he's just one of the foals and plays around with all of them, and goes exploring and so forth.
* OHOHO Smoky met a porcupine! He didn't get very hurt, just a few quills in his nose - we do have a taaaaad bit of the "our protagonist is extremely lucky in order to Encounter all these Potential Disasters without getting seriously hurt like so many other wossnames in the same position do", which is so common in baby-animal stories (I remember reading one about a baby octopus once, WOW), but it's not too unrealistic.
* Now Smoky has met a calf, and this is the end of the chapter. Chapter 2 is "Smoky Meets the Human", which is... direct. ;-)
* Oo-er. It is high summer now, and Smoky starts out by meeting A BEAR. Well, a bear cub first - which he follows, being curious - and then a mama bear which roars at him and he RUNS AWAY FAST.
* Smoky's mother teaches him how to run away from rattlesnakes, and he learns about most of the other animals of the West, except wolves and mountain lions; James acknowledges that if wee curious baby Smoky had met either of those he probably wouldn't have survived to have a story written about him, but the herd was careful and kept watch out for those. I take it back about the sentimental drivel, sir; you really could have used a better editor, but you're hitting pretty much Cedric the Forester levels of un-soppy realism.
* A cowboy comes and rounds up the herd and drives them into a corral, and picks out one of the other horses for breaking (Smoky's four months old, not old enough to ride yet). Hee, and here's a description from Smoky's POV of the cowboy lighting a cigarette - I would have loved this book as an eight-or-ten-year-old. The level of detail and description is really amazingly well-handled.
* Ooh, and Smoky is branded... oh, liar, liar. "[I]t felt cool and there was no pain, for he was at the stage where the searing iron was no worse than a touch from the human hand." What on earth do you even mean by that, sir? LIAR, I CALL LIAR. :P
* Anyway, then Smoky and the herd are let loose again, and they have their first prairie winter, and then in the spring Smoky's mother has another foal, and that ends this chapter. (It's longer than it sounds; I'm just enjoying a lot of it and not making too many notes on it. I'm already forty pages in.)
* Now it's Smoky's next summer, he's a yearling, and the herd is on the move; the mountain trail forks, Smoky wanders off on the wrong path from the rest of the herd, and HE MEETS A MOUNTAIN LION. Happily, he's saved by a rattlesnake buzzing and setting him running off just before the cougar pounces! O_O
* Oh, I say! The author gets to use "as if the devil was after 'em", and then remarks that "devil" might be too mild a name for the mountain lion. Curse words are apparently no obstacle to winning a Newbery in 1927. Might we be seeing the beginning of a lean toward realism instead of soapsuds already?
(I do note the ubiquitous characterization of herbivores = good, carnivores = bad, which tends to crop up in animal stories, but OH WELL. ;P)
* Hee, Smoky as a yearling and a two-year-old is an ornery little horse-teenage cuss. We skim over that pretty quickly, but with enough detail that it doesn't feel like a sudden jump in the narrative, just a proper elision of stuff that's already been told once.
* "There was so much life wrapped up in that pony's hide that it was mighty hard for him to settle down and behave, and even as a three year old he sometimes had to bust out and do things that wasn't at all proper and which made the old horses set their ears back and show their teeth." You know, this is... I'm not quite sure what to say about it, because there are good arguments on both sides, but one side is that portraying your protagonist as so spirited and awesome he just HAS to make trouble is kind of a bad idea in a kids' book, because kids of the same relative age - six, eight, ten, twelve - are likely to take it as permission to be ornery and cause trouble and laugh off consequences, because they're the most special and lively kids they know, and they're just showing how awesome they are. I know I did. (We're going to get a bit of depiction-without-judgment of that same belief when we hit Beverly Cleary's Ramona and Her Father, which I am muchly looking forward to.)
I mean, I know it's a reaction against the Sunday-school "moral tales" that Louisa May Alcott wrote against, but surely there's got to be a middle ground, a way to portray active and occasionally troublesome kids neither as devils to be eaten by monsters nor as special and important people who have a RIGHT to waltz around making trouble with their "Ooh, look, I'm so high-spirited!" (This has been me, I know what I'm talking about. *g*)
* Uhhh, Mr James, either you've carefully skipped over another round-up or I don't think Smoky is a gelding (warning: gory images at link) just yet. It doesn't mean "younger horse than a stallion", you know. (I'd not put it past him to have skipped a round-up - we are still dealing with 1926-1927 mores here - but I'm just mentioning.) Also, you were JUST talking about how Smoky's learned to fight with other "studs" with reference to "appropriating mares". Make up your mind?
* So anyway, a big black stallion steals the old buckskin saddle-horse's herd of mares, and Smoky and the buckskin form a little bachelor herd and browse around for a while.
* BWAHAHAHAHAHA. Sorry, Mr James - *points and laughs* He's just so utterly ignoring the buckskin's main reason for wanting to find another herd of mares to take on, in favor of this epic line of epic weirdness: "All would be hunkydory again for the buckskin if he could find another bunch to run with where there was mares and little colts. He had a mighty strong failing for the little fellers and most any bunch would do if there was only a few of them in". Wooooooow. (Smoky, in contrast, wants his mom and his year-mates back.)
* Smoky helps the buckskin steal a herd of mares and colts from a young chestnut, and then gets to tag along with that herd for the whole summer, so maybe he is a gelding after all, as Will James is now saying again. (Smoky's four years old now, which istr is adult for a horse.) Then Smoky takes a wrong fork in the trail again on the way to winter pastures... but winds up going back to winter with the buckskin's herd. If Smoky gets a lady-friend or so after all this telegraphing of him definitely being a gelding, I'm going to be CONFUSED. O_O
* New chapter! "The End of a Rope". And back in the first chapter the narrator remarked that Smoky would get his name when he was four years old, so I assume he's going to get rounded up for good pretty soon.
* Ooh. It's a bad winter, the stockmen didn't have enough hay to put out (the narrator throws in a remark that they'd done as much as they could), and eventually the cattle and horses start dying from lack of food. Then the wolves begin to move in.
* Smoky and the buckskin lead their herd away, running from the wolves, but eventually Smoky - still curious - drops back a little to see what the wolves are actually about, and... doesn't get eaten. :-) Instead, he winds up leading the wolves away from the herd for a while, which gives the herd a rest, and then when the wolves decide Smoky is too active to bother fighting with, he follows them right back.
* Uhhhh. The buckskin has been harrying some small foals at the rear of the herd to make them keep up with the rest, away from the wolves; "of course the little fellers' mammies would of fought for 'em too but they was at the stage where they felt every horse was for himself, they'd scared into a stampede and was all a running for their own lives." I DISAPPROVE, SIR. Stop with this making the boy horses always the most awesome and interesting of the lot.
* Okay, so Smoky and the buckskin between them save the herd from the wolves. Then the next spring, some cowboys come and round up the herd and cut out just the four-year-olds, including Smoky, and start them to being broken. Beginning of chapter five, "The Bronc Twister Steps Up".
* We have a human with a name! The "bronc twister" is named Clint. I reserve the right to imagine him as being played by Jeremy Renner till further notice. ;-)
* Clint is thirty, and has been "twisting" or breaking broncs since he was a teenager; he's getting old for the job, now. But we have half a page explaining that any good cowboy would rather ride a horse that's been treated well and has some spirit, than a sad and leg-weary one, even if riding the more spirited horses wears the cowboy down faster and leads him to an early grave.
* MISTER JAMES. This entire page is about how Clint feels "sort of married to them ponies" and is sad when he has to turn each lot over to the other cowboys for further training, and says "Some day I'm going to meet a horse I'll really get married to, and then there'll be things a popping." SIR PLEASE JUST WHAAAAAAAAAT. O_O Words! They do not mean what you think they mean!
* Oh, Clint, this is not professional. Will James, this is not good writing. Clint feels Smoky to be the kind of horse "he'd steal if he couldn't buy, and if he could neither steal nor buy he'd work for", and then decides that if anyone else tries to take Smoky for THEIR horse, that he'll rather make an outlaw (an unbreakable, unridable horse) of Smoky than let him be anyone else's. YOUR ETHICS, SIR.
* At least Mr James does call it out, "That was no way for Clint to feel maybe" etc, but excuses him on grounds that "that feeling was past skin deep with him". I just don't know! o_O
* So Clint takes special care and trains Smoky a lot more carefully than he does the other horses (though he isn't sloppy with them), and uses his free time for the training so that he doesn't feel like he's wasting company money paying him to train his own horse. Mr James seems in two minds here - Clint says again that it'll be bad enough if he has to steal Smoky, but the narrator follows it up with the assertion that "Of course Clint couldn't steal that horse or no other one". Hmmm. I think he's having some trouble balancing the realistic feelings of the character with the obligation of a 1920s author to throw in a bit of moral high ground... especially as Wiki tells me Will James himself was jailed for cattle rustling at one point, and at another point changed his name from Joseph Dufault to evade another charge. ;-)
* Anyway, here's a really long interesting clear passage on how Smoky is broken to saddle, and almost three pages about how "breaking" a horse IS NOT breaking its spirit but just schooling it - how a person that's going to break a horse has to be gentle but consistent with it, and teach it carefully about ropes and saddles and so forth. It's obvious that Will James feels just as strongly about this stuff as Dr Dolittle (and presumably Hugh Lofting) did about bullfighting and the caging of big cats in zoos.
* The breaking Smoky to saddle continues into the next chapter, still with all this careful explanation of the best method and how it works from Smoky's point of view.
* THESE ARE THE BEST ILLUSTRATIONS OKAY, and I've seen some horse-book illustrations, I have. Will James, if it's him that's doing these drawings, can draw a horse in action MOST AMAZINGLY.
* He's really excellent with pacing - I'm on page 121, where I find this remark: "All that took time, and the cowboy learned him only one thing each day, sometimes very little of that one thing,--but as the days went by it all accumulated to a lot." It has taken time! I'm two-fifths of the way through the book and we're still on four-year-old Smoky being broken to saddle... but Will James is a REALLY EXCELLENT WRITER; there hasn't been a single spot where I've felt the book was bogging down. It's well on a par with Black Beauty, so far, as a horse book.
* Hmmm. We get into chapter seven, "Smoky Shows His Feelings", and here's another named human character - "Jeff Nicks, cow foreman of the Rocking R outfit" (that being the ranch that branded Smoky as a foal).
* Okay, Jeff sees from a distance a horse dragging something, so he rides down to check what's wrong; it's Smoky, who seems to be half-dragging half-carrying a rider who's hanging on to the saddle horn from the wrong side. Then Jeff rides a bit closer and sees that he's not dragging Clint (the rider is Clint, of course) but helping him along, because Clint seems to be hurt. After a while, Smoky finds a rock and lets Clint get up into the saddle, where Clint passes out. Smoky brings him home to the corral, but is shy of Jeff, because Clint's the only human Smoky knows as a friend.
* Clint manages to wake up enough to slide off of Smoky near the fence, so that Jeff can drag him out under the rails. Jeff brings Clint into the bunkhouse and tucks him up and gives him some broth; after he's rested, Clint requests that Jeff go take Smoky's saddle off and put him on a picket rope, but Jeff doesn't think Smoky is gentled except to Clint's handling, and refuses. Smoky doesn't mind being left overnight because he's worried about Clint; as Jeff puts it, "a fretting his head that I'm going to eat you up".
* I like the tone of this book; it's very much to horses as Albert Payson Terhune is to dogs, portraying them as very smart but not magically, unrealistically so. (Yes, I grew up on a load of Terhune books.)
* Anyway, the next day Clint manages to go out and unsaddle Smoky and put him to feed, and then he explains to Jeff what happened, which is that Clint messed up a bit in roping a cow for Smoky's practice, and the cow managed rather awkwardly to throw both man and horse. Clint says he intends to give up bronc-busting, because he recognizes the same "ailing" that he picked up a few years back while breaking an ornery horse, and doesn't want to be permanently disabled.
* So Clint requests to be allowed to become a standard cowboy with the company, and to get to keep Smoky as one of the horses in his "string" of mounts as long as he's working for that company. Jeff - who rather wants Smoky himself because apparently Smoky is a super-awesome horse (this has been properly foreshadowed, I just didn't drag it in) - hems and haws for a page or two, calls out Clint on holding Smoky back when the cowboys came by a month ago to collect *pointedly* ALL the broncs Clint had got ready for saddle in that time... but eventually Jeff says Smoky is obviously a one-man horse and as long as Jeff's bossing the outfit, Clint can have Smoky in his string.
* In a month, Clint is well enough to ride if Smoky doesn't buck for him - which Smoky doesn't. So they head out to the main camp of the ranching outfit just in time for the big fall roundup, which will start in the next chapter.
* A few days into the roundup (and about twenty pages of good well-handled storytelling description further on), Clint finally picks out Smoky to take out on the day's actual roundup ride, called a "circle". Smoky's feeling chipper and bucks all over the place for fun, but Clint's well enough to handle it by this time.
* After which Smoky gets to feeling that he's an experienced cow-horse - which he isn't, but he's getting there. The roundup goes on, and eventually Smoky is allowed to help manage the big herd of cows that have been rounded up. Have I mentioned this is a really well-written book, if one makes allowances for the cowboy language? BECAUSE IT IS. This whole chapter is about how Smoky starts learning to be a proper team cowhorse but is still Clint's favorite and Clint is his favorite too. And it's really well-handled, well-paced, and I'm getting fairly used to the cowboy spelling and language, because Will James knows what he's doing with it; it isn't put on for fake.
* The next chapter, over the winter, Smoky and his little brother Pecos (who was re-introduced earlier but I didn't mention him) have a big fight with a mean black horse. Other than that it's a good winter, plenty of food and shelter, and the next spring Clint is the first cowboy to round up Smoky's group of horses. Smoky doesn't remember him at first, but once the horses are corralled, Clint talks to him a while till Smoky starts to remember, and eventually makes friends with him again. :D
* Another year goes by, in which Smoky learns a lot and becomes a Proper Cow Horse. Except he still bucks some every time he's ridden.
* Clint doesn't mind the bucking, though, because... oh lol. OH LOL.
* Okay, the other book I'm working on for this year, the Mock Newbery? The title character is named Tom Jarvis. The superintendent and part-owner of this ranch, who has an eye for a good horse and notices Smoky now at fall roundup, is also named Tom Jarvis. O_O Who'd'a thunk?!
* So - apparently it's considered rude to ask a cowboy to swap one of his horses out of his string, and is the Old West version of a pink slip; but "Old Tom" here wants Smoky enough to do it anyway. But Clint doesn't want to leave Smoky behind, so he jibes Tom into trying to saddle and ride Smoky, and into being angry while he tries it.
* Of course Smoky bucks Tom off, twice, and before Tom can try the third time, Jeff Nicks tries to talk him out of it by saying Smoky "bucks every time he's rode". So Tom - who used to be better at riding a bronc but is in his forties or fifties and can't handle it anymore - gets extremely mad and fires Clint on the spot, saying he'll get someone else to make Smoky stop bucking. Jeff speaks up to the effect that hiring and firing is HIS business, not Tom's... and gets fired for it as well!
* But when Jeff and Clint come up to the ranch house to get their pay, Tom is already cooled down and thinking he'd better try to smooth things over, so when Jeff remarks that all the riders on the outfit want to quit as well if Jeff is let go, Tom offers to re-hire Jeff - and then agrees that Clint was never really fired, so it's fine for Clint to stick around too. Tom even asserts that he'll never try to take Smoky from Clint again. :D
* Another year goes by, and another, up until Smoky has done five years as a Rocking R cowhorse. Most of the other cowboys and horses have left and been replaced in that time, but Jeff and Clint and a few other old hands are still with the Rocking R.
* New word! Most of the other cowboys had "went and throwed their soogans on some other outfit's wagons."
* So Smoky has been Clint's horse all this time, nobody else riding or saddling him since Old Tom tried, and he's become an awesome cow-horse. There's one story Clint and the others especially like to tell about how awesome he is, which Will James is now going to tell me. "It was only an average of the others that happened, but there was something about that one which made the telling easier as to the wonders of that horse. It was the detail that counted there." WHICH IS THIS ENTIRE BOOK IN A NUTSHELL, good on you sir for writing your own best blurb so properly. ;D
* Here is the story: There's a big steer that they have to rope in order to cut off one of its horns, which is growing crooked and going to poke out its eye. Clint gets the steer roped around the neck, but then the front cinch of his saddle breaks and Clint flies off. The saddle's half off of Smoky, who could buck out of it easily enough, but instead he bucks himself back into it and then stops the steer as perfectly as if he had a rider telling him what to do. :D
* So Smoky starts getting a reputation across the West, and other ranches start offering to buy him, till the price gets up to eight times the going price for a cowhorse - but even then, Old Tom tells Clint he won't sell Smoky off unless he needed the money to pull the ranch through a bad winter or some such thing.
* Naturally the next winter is a bad one. Okay, let's see what happens. ^_^
* Clint sees it's going to be a hard winter with little feed for the horses, and makes a note to go and check on Smoky after a while, but he doesn't get out there for over a month because the first blizzard is so bad - it covers up all the prairie grass with packed snow - and he's kept so busy bringing in more and more cattle to be fed.
* After a while, he does get out there and spot Smoky, who's still in okay condition (enough to run away, anyway) but getting thin. Clint wants to bring Smoky in for the winter to be safe, but he finds two stray cows with newborn winter calves that he has to save, so he leaves Smoky out away. This chapter's title is "Among the Missing", so I'm a bit worried. ;P
* Another blizzard does scour off some of the packed snow down to just a few inches thick, so that the livestock can paw through for food, and that's what saves their lives that winter, because the ranch can't feed them all on bought hay. So Smoky, we're assured, is doing fine - but Clint can't get back out to check on him.
* So eventually another rider comes and rustles away Smoky's little herd of cowhorses, and drives them off through a snowstorm through which they won't be tracked. This rider is described thus, while he's sleeping in a sheltered camp: "All of him, from the toe of his gunny sack covered boots to the dark face which showed under the wore out black hat, pointed out as the man being a half-breed of Mexican and other blood that's darker, [I legit don't know if he means Native American or Black] and noticing the cheap, wore out saddle, the ragged saddle-blanket on a horse that should of had some chance to feed instead of being tied up, showed that he was a halfbreed from the bad side, not caring, and with no pride."
Which... uh. Hm. That's... annoying. Not as bad as it could be? But bad enough. :P I mean, thankfully, he does allow for the existence of half-breeds "from the good side", whatever that might be - and for all I know, there might have been some kind of cultural thing going on where mixed-race people WERE a bit more likely to be sloppy troublemakers, being already outcasts from both sides of their ancestry, as it were. Descriptive rather than prescriptive racism, maybe. Still, as this is the first person of color to turn up in the story, it's bad. :P
* This rustler is referred to in the book simply as "the breed". Trying to think of a better name to call him, I think I'll just go with "the rustler".
* The rustler tries to rope Smoky for a fresh riding horse, but misses his throw in the dark and ropes in a different horse instead. He says he'll get Smoky next time.
* We return to Clint, who couldn't get back out to find Smoky for a while, and when he finally does get out there, obviously can't find Smoky. He gets worried, looks around every time he can get away, and finally concludes that Smoky's whole little "bunch" of horses has been stolen. Old Tom isn't much worried when Clint tells him this, but asserts Smoky etc have just wandered off and they'll find 'em at spring roundup.
* But after spring roundup, Smoky still is not found, and after a few days Old Tom decides he really has been stolen and reports the same to the sheriff. A reward is put out, $1000 for the thief, the same for the horses, and Smoky being described specially.
* No sign of Smoky is found all that year, and after fall roundup, Clint gets ready to leave the Rocking R. At this point we return to Smoky, who's a few hundred miles south in Arizona.
* The last time we saw Smoky, the rustler had said he'd catch him the next day to ride. But Smoky has learned to dodge a rope, from the rustler missing him that one time, and so he keeps dodging till the rustler outwits him by pretending to throw the rope, waiting till he's stopped dodging, and then throwing it for real. Then the rustler ties him up to a post and beats him with a branch, till Smoky finally breaks free from the rope as the branch is getting ready to snap. So the rustler gives up and catches a not-ornery horse to ride that day.
* Will James explains that Smoky has always hated and feared humans by instinct, except Clint managed to befriend him, but he's never been VICIOUS toward humans till this rustler came along and beat him. Now Smoky wants to kill the rustler. There's a lot of... well, it reads to me as harping on the man's skin color, but given Will James's fondness for epithets anyway, it could just be an ill-chosen descriptor like "the red-haired man" - OR it could be one of the main things that Smoky can tell the man from other humans by, given that he probably hasn't seen a lot of dark-skinned people on the Rocking R, which is stated to be near a thousand miles north of the Arizona area where Smoky winds up being kept.
* Smoky and the rustler carry on their mutual hating of each other's guts till Smoky eventually escapes the rustler's corral and runs wild. (*sigh* Will James, I do not appreciate that the first person who's taken a well-deserved and instant dislike to anyone in this book is a random white cowboy who doesn't know Smoky etc are rustled, taking a dislike to the mixed-race rustler. :P)
* But in the fall, the same fall where Clint's getting ready to leave the Rocking R, the rustler sets up a trap corral and a string of relay horses, and catches Smoky again.
* Oh, oh, oh. :-( Smoky gets more and more... I'm going to say depressed here... and seems likely to die, not even caring when the rustler rides him and whips him and spurs him, till one day he goes a little too far, stirs Smoky to buck a little at him, and tries to beat the last bit of spirit out of Smoky.
"From that day on Smoky's heart began to expand towards natural size once more-- But it wasn't the same kind of heart that had once been his,--that first one had died, and this one had took root from abuse, growed from rough treatment to full size, and with hankerings in it only for finding and destroying all that wasn't to his liking. And there was nothing to his liking no more." Ow. Ow, ow, ow. Mr Will James, HOW DO YOU KNOW SO EXACTLY what does happen to an animal - or a person - that's constantly abused for too long? :P Ouch.
* So one day the rustler takes Smoky out for a long ride to try and break him enough to sell him for a good price as the excellent cowhorse he used to be - but he pushes a little too hard, and Smoky throws him and (it's implied) kills him before the rustler can shoot Smoky dead.
* Next chapter: "When the Good Leaves". We hear of a bucking horse, and of a reward offered to any man in the country who can ride him. He's nicknamed "The Cougar" for his ferocity and viciousness.
* OH THANK YOU WILL JAMES. You restore my faith in your writerliness. "The Cougar", formerly Smoky (obvs), "seemed to hate some humans worse than others,--his hate was plainest for the face that showed dark." SO YOU DID HAVE A REASON for harping so much on the rustler's dark skin. I will even go so far as to say that it was a good choice, as Smoky would have seen any other likely distinguishing feature before on harmless men - hair color or build or a certain habitual kind of clothing - but wouldn't likely have seen a cowboy as brown-skinned as this half-Mexican half-Black rustler, and therefore associates that skin color with being beaten and abused. And your note about "a half-breed from the BAD side" shows, I think, a bit of goodwill / not trying to generalize about race. (Still not un-racist enough unless you actually SHOW us one or more likeable dark-skinned people, but I will give you credit where it's due.)
* THESE ARE ALL OF THE BEST DRAWINGS. You know the classic pose of a bucking horse? These aren't it. Every one of these drawings of any horse is a different pose, from an unusual angle, clearly done by a man who knew horses and was drawing the trickiest, most twisted-up bucking poses he could think of, all perfectly.
* Smoky puts in two years as The Cougar, being owned by a rodeo as a specialty bucking horse, and becomes something of a celebrity in a wrestling-star kind of way. Then there comes a freckle-faced hotshot kid who's pretty sure he can ride anything that stands; he hangs on longer than most riders, but then comes near getting killed and is only saved because Smoky accidentally throws him over the fence of the rodeo ring and can't trample him. From that time on, he goes to each rodeo he can get to where The Cougar is ridden, and keeps trying to figure him out in hopes of riding him to a standstill.
* Three more years go past, and then one more year draws toward fall, and "a cowboy from the Wyoming country, who'd come south for the winter" signs up for the bucking-bronc rounds of which the Cougar is the championship match. This cowboy manages to ride The Cougar for ten seconds - the standard length of time required to "win" a bronc ride. Everyone is astonished, but someone notes that maybe The Cougar is finally beginning to slow down a bit... which, given that Smoky is now what, fifteen years old? isn't that surprising.
* Indeed - the freckle-face is the next person to ride The Cougar for ten seconds, and by the end of the year's last rodeo, The Cougar has been ridden four times in all, once to a standstill. And he doesn't seem quite as murderous as he used to be.
* This is not actually, the narrator explains, because Smoky is slowing down; he's just getting over the worst of the hatred he got from the rustler, after being well-treated for five years and never beaten or struck in that time. "The heart of The Cougar was shriveling up and leaving space for the heart that was Smoky's, and that heart, even tho older and weaker was making a mighty strong stand, and steady coming back." OH. OH. OH YOU. *howwwww* This writer, people.
* Hee! Okay, the day comes when Smoky is let out of the chute and just doesn't buck at all, but runs across the fairgrounds on a lope. And here is the next paragraph: "The crowd was disappointed, they felt they wasn't getting their money's worth, and there was hollers of 'take him away and hook him up on a milk wagon,' or 'sell him for a lady's saddle horse,' and so on.--It was queer, but only natural, to notice that them loud mouth remarks was passed only by the most useless, and of the kind that's plum helpless whenever away from their home grounds. Others hollered more to kind of show off, but the looks they'd get from the sensible folks around only went to prove that the show off was of just plain ignorance." YOU TELL 'EM, BUSTER. :D
* That rider turns Smoky loose at the other side of the grounds, and the rodeo people sell him to the livery stable before they leave town with their new star bucker (who was introduced earlier) and the other horses.
* The livery stable owner planned to break Smoky to harness and hire him out to pull carriages, but before that happens, a group of tourists come to town and want to go horse-riding. So the owner tries Smoky with a saddle, and Smoky doesn't buck at all; so he hires him out. He doesn't want to say this is "The Cougar", the famous bucking horse, so he renames him "Cloudy".
* Cloudy becomes a popular livery horse in town, and the author spends several well-filled pages ripping into how badly people treat a rental horse - very Black Beauty, if a little less... Dickensian!activist in tone. "The boys, girls, and grown ups kept a setting on the old horse, and not knowing, but sure and steady was riding and dragging him down to a death that'd be away ahead of the time when it should come-- They'd compared well with a pack of wolves, for like that kind, none of 'em would ever wanted to come within a hundred yards of the horse when he was up and a fighting." Oh, give it to 'em, sir. Tell 'em off! :D
* Winter comes just in time to save "Cloudy" from dying of overwork, even though the livery owner feeds him okay and tries to take good care of him - short of giving him time off to rest, which he can't afford.
* The next year, an old gentleman who rides for exercise and a young lady who loves horses both ask if they can ride Cloudy every day, so the livery owner lets him take just those two, which is much easier on him than the kind of racing the boys who'd rent him formerly used to do. But even so, he's getting very old and stiff, and it's hard for him even to walk out with his two regular riders, who both treat him very well.
* Aw. "If [the young lady] knowed that lumps of sugar wasn't the best thing there is to feed to a horse, she'd filled her pockets with a handful or so of grain instead, or something that's more fitting to a horse's stomach that way, but she didn't know, and she sure meant well." PREACH IT, BROTHER. I love these books that have a fair dose of authorial speechifying about something they really care about.
* One spring day, Cloudy goes out with his young lady rider on his back, and he wants to run. So she lets him, because the livery owner told her it'd be good for him to run short distances if he wanted. But he runs miles and miles, and she doesn't notice he's getting tired because he doesn't balk or slow down - he could well run himself to death, except they come to a spot where the trail's washed out, and she has to stop and then notices how badly he's panting and sweaty and all shaking.
* She thinks Cloudy is going to die of heatstroke, so she takes him into the stream and cools him down, and then brings him back home real slow, but he's still wobbly and stumbling.
* Then when she gets back, the stableman mentions that his new stable boy forgot to give Cloudy any water this morning. So from that time on, Cloudy just isn't fit to be ridden anymore - he's been "foundered", or ridden so hard he can never recover. ...I'm not sure I can finish this book, but there's only a couple dozen pages, so I'll try.
* The livery owner doesn't ask the girl what happened - he can tell - or tell her what she accidentally did, but tries to cheer her up by saying he'll try to doctor Cloudy up to feel a little better, and she comes and helps, buys him liniment and medicine and things... but the author explains exactly what's wrong with Smoky/Cloudy and how he can't get better.
* So one day, the girl comes in to find Cloudy is gone. The livery owner lies to her that he's turned Cloudy loose and that there's good pasture up north a ways where the horse can live free - but there actually isn't any good pasture close enough, and the livery owner, not wanting to let Cloudy starve but unable to feed him anymore, has sold him to be killed for chicken feed.
* One more chapter, called "Dark Clouds, Then Tall Grass".
* Smoky is put in a pasture with the other chicken-feed horses till someone comes and wants to buy some fresh horse meat, at which time whatever horse is the most run down will be shot. But he perks up a little bit, between the doctoring the young lady gave him and the being out in a pasture where he can eat okay and move around as he wants.
* Smoky perks up enough to survive past the other horses, and is kept in stock for an emergency. Finally, though, a wagon-driver comes and trades in his own dying old horse for Cloudy/Smoky - who feels it a disgrace to be put in harness (as does the author, it seems), and tries to run away at first, but once he tires himself out, behaves well enough.
* But the waggoner doesn't treat his horses well; he feeds them musty straw and runs them into the ground, getting a new one every six months or so. He uses them to plow his vegetable garden, then haul the vegetables to market in his wagon, and also do any other hauling jobs he can get.
* At rodeo time, the waggoner is especially busy, sometimes charging various people for jobs he didn't exactly do; and at one particular time, there's Clint the old cowboy with a friend, talking about horses. Clint gets mad at seeing Smoky (whom he doesn't recognize, though he does notice his color and the white "saddle-marks" by his withers) being whipped to make him go, but his friend calms him down and says probably the Humane Society people who hang around the rodeo will notice and get on the waggoner's neck about it. Then they turn to talking about how Old Tom Jarvis of the Rocking R is planning to sell up pretty soon, and how he's sold Clint part of the ranch - the camp where Clint used to break horses for him. Clint plans to stock it with a small herd of cattle.
* Oh, 1920s. :-( I can't tell anything about this waggoner's appearance except he's stated to have black whiskers, but not long after Clint figures out "Cloudy" is Smoky and starts beating up the waggoner for being mean to him, the sheriff (deciding from Smoky's appearance that he's on Clint's side of the altercation) warns him not to tear the waggoner to pieces TOO much because "you know we got to keep record of that kind the same as if it was a white man, and I don't want to be looking all over the streets to find out who he WAS." Which... the way I'm most inclined to take the tone, is that the waggoner is Caucasian but the sheriff figures the best way to insult him is by calling him "not a white man", just like a big compliment back in those days was to say someone was "white clear through". Which is SLIIIIIIGHTLY less bad than if the waggoner WAS actually non-white physically... still and all. *sigh* :P
* Well, Clint buys Smoky and takes him home, and pulls him through the winter - which is a near thing, but he makes it. Then he gets Smoky pretty much to as good a shape as he can be, anymore, but Smoky doesn't seem to remember him at all.
* One spring day, Clint brings in a little bunch of mares and foals, hoping to lift Smoky's spirits... and sure enough, Smoky takes to playing with the little foals like he was a two-year-old again himself. So Clint decides it's for the best to let Smoky go run with the herd and have fun, for however many more years he'll live. So he does that, and Smoky hesitates for a second but then runs off after the other horses. Clint's a bit sad, though, and wonders if Smoky ever will come back or remember him.
* And one more scene - a little later than same year, Smoky comes back and nickers outside the cabin door for Clint. Being well cared for, and then running over the mountains where he was born and lived for his first four years, made him remember. :D
In conclusion: I would call this book pretty solidly the Black Beauty of the USA, maybe even better than that. :-) It's so good and so well-written, I'm waffling on whether to give it five stars even despite the flickers of racism. O_O