Buffalo Before Breakfast

A small scruffy dog is barking outside Jack's bedroom window at the start of Buffalo Before Breakfast, before anybody has had any breakfast.

What happens

His name is Teddy, he is under a spell, and Morgan has left a rhyme in the tree house saying what will break it. Four gifts, each named in a rhyme. One has to come from the prairie, and one, eventually, from a kangaroo. Jack and Annie already have the first, a silver pocket watch stopped at twenty past two.

So this trip is for the prairie one. The tree house lands in grass so tall it comes up to Jack's chest, on a plain the book calls an ocean of grass, and the two of them wade through it until they find a circle of tepees.

Mary Pope Osborne does something quietly lovely with what happens next. Before Jack walks into the Lakota camp he looks up how to behave in it. Speak as few words as possible. Share gifts. Don't show fear. Hold up two fingers for friend. He straightens his shoulders and copies Annie's chin, and he feels braver because of it.

The boy they meet is called Black Hawk, he is ten or eleven, and he is showing off. Your reader will see where that is heading long before he does, which is exactly the right amount ahead to be.

There's a lot packed into a book this size. Ponies ridden without saddles or reins. A wolf skin that stands up on its back legs. A grandmother who explains why nobody here takes more buffalo than they need, and who later says a sentence about pride leading to showing off leading to trouble that is worth the whole chapter.

A note on the sad bit, because it isn't hidden. Jack reads that there were forty million bison on the plains and that a hundred years later there were fewer than three hundred, almost all killed by hunters and soldiers, and near the end he says out loud that the buffalo will vanish and so will this way of living. It's told straight, without pictures of it happening, and Annie answers him with something hopeful. A thoughtful child may well want to talk about it afterwards. Honestly, that's half the point of it.

There are jokes too. Jack gets a Lakota name he is extremely pleased with. Somebody sneezes at completely the wrong moment.

What to read next

If the four-gift hunt is what gets them, the next one is Tigers at Twilight. Teddy turns up again, the tree house takes them to a forest in India, and this time the trouble has stripes.