Title: Down the Long Hills
Author: Louis L’Amour
Publisher: Bantam
Date: 1968; my copy was “16th printing, March 1979”
ISBN: 0-553-12594-X
Length: 150 pages
Quote: “When folks crossed the plains together everybody had to do his or her part. Even Betty Sue, who was just past three, collected buffalo chips.”
Betty Sue’s baby ways saved her and seven-year-old Hardy when a Comanche raiding party killed the adults and took most of their stuff. The children still have a horse to ride, if they can climb onto his back—they’re not especially tall children, and he’s a tall horse. Sometimes they have to walk beside the horse and sometimes they lose him, but he’s a faithful horse and always comes back to his little trail buddies. Hardy has a father, somewhere, if he can survive long enough to find him. He’s heard that his father is about a month’s ride away, so he takes his bearings, boosts Betty Sue onto the horse—they were born to different parents, but now they’re each other’s only friends—and rides on to find his Pa.
Little do the children know that they’re being followed. By a grizzly bear who’s never seen the use of humans in this world, but does like horses—for food. By Ashawakie, a Cheyenne who wants the horse, likes the children’s courage, and thinks the children might make good Cheyennes. (The only time Ashawakie will admit to himself that he’s been afraid was his first encounter with this bear.) By Hardy’s Pa and some other men who’ve heard about the massacre. And by a couple of White men whose attitude toward the children is closer to the bear’s than even the Comanches’. In the course of the story, each of these pursuers will catch up with the children. The odds are against the children and their horse…but then again they are characters in a novel about the kind of scrapes frontier children really did survive, if lucky.
What’s not to like? It’s still a “western”; the body count necessary to achieve a happy ending will not be limited to, or even necessarily include, the bear.
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