For once Uncle Seth seemed to have no opinion. He took his rifle and rode off to look for the game that he had just said wasn't there.

7 WHILE we were fixing our wagon for about the fourth time in a week, the thing that G.T. used to worry about finally happened: a bear sprang out and went for him. We had been struggling through what Father Villy called the malpais--he said it just meant "bad country," and this country was certainly bad, a land of dips and dry creeks and sharp rocky gullies.

Some of the gullies were so hard to pull out of that we had to hitch all the mules to the wagon. The mules were up to this rough travel, but our old wagon wasn't. The dryness loosened the spokes, and they began to fall out of the wheels. Then one day, as we were easing up out of a steep gully, one of the rear wheels just suddenly came off and went rolling down the gully, in the direction of the Platte River.

When the wheel came off, the rear end of the wagon dropped and the wagon box shook loose and fell out, spilling most of my ma's cooking stuff.

Marcy had been napping--before anyone could catch her she slid out of the back of the wagon and had the bad luck to land right on a little cactus.

"Whoa! Whoa! We're wrecked!" Uncle Seth said to Ma, who was driving. Ma stopped the mules, but I don't think she quite took in what had happened until she noticed the wagon wheel rolling off down the gully.

"Dern the luck, where does that wheel think it's going?" she said. "One of you boys go get it, quick."

Father Villy had just picked up the baby when the bear sprang out--it had been down in the gully, trying to dig out a ground squirrel, when the wagon wheel came rolling along and startled Mr. Bruin.

G.T. had just started to go retrieve the wheel when a brown bear that looked as big as a hill came roaring up toward him. What saved G.T. was Charlie Seven Days's little sorrel horse, which had the bad luck to be nibbling a little growth of bunch-grass on the side of the gully. Before the horse could move the bear whacked it like Ma might whack G.T. if her temper was up. The sorrel horse died on the spot, of a broken neck. G.T.

was paralyzed: he couldn't move. It was his good luck that Uncle Seth happened to have his rifle in his hand, and that he was a skilled 84

sharpshooter, too. You wouldn't think a little thing like a bullet could kill a bear that size, but Uncle Seth killed it with two shots. When the bear first sprang out it seemed to be right on us, but in fact it was a fair way down the gully. Uncle Seth's second shot caused it to sit down and look thoughtful. It pawed at itself for a moment and then flopped over, dead. Once killed, it didn't look half as big as it had looked while it was alive, but it was still twice as big as any bear you'd find in Missouri.

G.T. was so shocked he didn't realize he was alive. He couldn't even talk, for several minutes.

"This solves the vittles problem but not the wagon problem," Uncle Seth said. "If the wheel hadn't come off I doubt that bear would even have noticed us."

I guess Ma hadn't been as impressed by the bear as the rest of us were, besides which she was impatient by nature. Ma hated delays, even delays caused by grizzly bears.

"That bear's dead, G.T.--go on and get the wagon wheel," she said.

G.T. didn't even answer. I think he was still trying to convince himself he was alive.

"Leave him be, Mary Margaret," Uncle Seth said. "He's had a shock."

He and Charlie Seven Days eased down the gully and took a closer look at the bear. They had their guns at the ready, in case the bear was just playing possum.

"It's dead--I can see that much from here," Ma said. "What's everybody lolling around for? My wagon box is broken, my baby's full of cactus, that wagon wheel's probably still rolling, and you're all standing around looking at a dead bear. We need to get this wagon fixed or we'll still be in this gully tomorrow. "

Neva, who was fearless if she was anything, finally went and got the wagon wheel, rolling it back up the gully it had just rolled down. If we hadn't had Father Villy, though, I doubt we could ever have got the wheel back on the wagon. He lifted the whole back end of the wagon and held it long enough for us to wedge the wheel back on.

The task of butchering the bear and the horse was left to Charlie, who was very quick and skillful with a skinning knife. He tried to show G.T.

and I how to cut up a large animal--we were eager to try out our new knives--but we were so slow and did so many things wrong that Ma finally called off the lesson. Her lifelong habit of interfering with whatever happened to be going on irritated Uncle Seth sometimes, and this was one of the times.

"Don't you even want these boys to know how to cut up a bear?" he asked her.

"Not particularly," Ma said. "They might live the rest of their lives without needing to cut up another bear."

85

G.T. and I talked about that grizzly bear for the rest of our lives, but it was plain that it had made little impression on Ma.

"Good Lord, it was just a bear," she said. "It's no more inconvenient than having a baby fall on a cactus."

"It would have been if I hadn't been around tn

shoot it," Uncle Seth pointed out. "At the very least it would have laid waste to the mules."

"Why make up notions about things that didn't happen?" Ma asked. "You were along to shoot it, and that's one reason you're along on this trip: so you can shoot things that need to be shot."

"I wish I was as practical as you are, Mary Margaret," Uncle Seth said.

It was plain that Ma's bossy ways had put a strain on his temper, again.

"Well, you ain't, and that's that," Ma said, as if that settled the matter.

Not only was Charlie Seven Days the best at cutting up dead bears and dead horses, he also turned out to be the best at getting cactus thorns out of babies. He soaked them loose in some warm water and then rubbed some bear grease on Marcy's punctures, so she wouldn't be so whiny.

I guess knowing how to cure cactus punctures was what Ma considered a practical skill. She was real friendly to Charlie after that.

8 AFTER that morning when the bear sprang out it seemed like some little thing went wrong with the wagon every day. The rocks and the creeks and the gullies--the malpais, as Father Villy called it--were destroying our wagon a little at a time.

Ma knew it but she did her best to ignore it, waiting impatiently while Uncle Seth and Father Villy repaired the spoke or the hitch or the shaft-whatever went wrong on a given day.

"How far till we're done with this malpais?" she asked the priest. "I've had about enough of it."

"Another week, ma'am," Father Villy said.

Once again, though, it turned out that being a little distance back from a big wagon train was a piece of luck--our wagon wasn't the only con-out with our turd sacks, would spot some little piece of equipment that had been dropped by the big train. Once we even found a whole wagon that had been abandoned. The Indians had picked it over some, but there were still lots of valuable parts that we could scavenge--and we did. Uncle Seth even broke up the bottom and sides, to use to patch the holes in our wagon bed.

"There's no reason for any part of the United States to be this big," Ma said one morning. A rear wheel had just come loose again, which meant a slow day.

"It's even bigger in some places," Father Villy said.

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"I don't see how it could be bigger," Ma said, a position I agreed with.

Sometimes we'd come to the top of a hill or ridge only to have the sky swell out above us and the horizon retreat so far away that it was hard to believe we could ever get across to it. "Montana's bigger," Father Villy assured Ma. "I hope my husband's had the good sense to stay out of Montana then," Ma said. Though the breakdowns vexed her, it was clear that she had no intention of giving up.