He wanted to be treated like a man, not a child. Every summer the men of the Chavez family go on a long and difficult sheep drive to the mountains. All the men, that is, except for Miguel. All year long, twelve-year-old Miguel tries to prove that he, too, is up to the challenge'that he, too, is up to the challenge'that he, too is ready to take the sheep into his beloved Sangre de Cristo Mountains. When his deeds go unnoticed, he prays to San Ysidro, the saint for farmers everywhere. And his prayer is answered . . . but with devastating consequences. When you act like and adult but get treated like a child, what else can you do but keep your wishes secret and pray that they'll come true. This is the story of a twelve-year-old Miguel Chavez, who yearns in his heart to go with the men of his family on a long and hard sheep drive to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains--until his prayer is finally answered, with a disturbing and dangerous exchange. Cover illustration by Chris Miles - Interior illustrations by Jean Charlot "A memorable and deeply moving story of a family of New Mexican sheepherders, in which Miguel, neither child nor man, tells of his great longing to accompany men and sheep to summer pasture, and expresses his need to be recognized as a maturing individual."-- BL. He wanted to be treated like a man, not a child. Every summer the men of the Chavez family go on a long and difficult sheep drive to the mountains. All the men, that is, except for Miguel. All year long, twelve-year-old Miguel tries to prove that he, too, is up to the challenge'that he, too, is up to the challenge'that he, too is ready to take the sheep into his beloved Sangre de Cristo Mountains. When his deeds go unnoticed, he prays to San Ysidro, the saint for farmers everywhere. And his prayer is answered . . . but with devastating consequences. When you act like and adult but get treated like a child, what else can you do but keep your wishes secret and pray that they'll come true. This is the story of a twelve-year-old Miguel Chavez, who yearns in his heart to go with the men of his family on a long and hard sheep drive to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains--until his prayer is finally answered, with a disturbing and dangerous exchange. Cover illustration by Chris Miles - Interior illustrations by Jean Charlot Joseph Krumgold received the Newbery Medal for ...And Now Miguel. One of the few people to receive the medal twice, he was subsequently awarded it for his novel Onion John, also available in a Harper Trophy edition. Jean Charlot was a master lithographer and muralist whose works are a part of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. CHAPTER ONE It was love at first sight and I was astonished that it should be happening to me because the first sight had nothing in the least alluring about it. The roads from airports to cities rarely do. I was like a man who bewilders his friends by becoming infatuated with a particularly unprepossessing woman-warts and a squint and a harelip. 'What on earth does he see in her?' I've often wondered myself. What did I see in that dreary road which was taking me to Paris? This sudden incomprehensible love affair might have been a little less mysterious if I had arrived in France with gooseflesh anticipations of romantic garrets and dangerous liaisons in them, the Latin Quarter and champagne at five francs a bottle, and artists' studios-all the preposterous sentimental paraphernalia from absinthe to midinettes. But I had not included any of these notions in my meagre luggage, I had no preliminary yearnings towards the country. Rather the contrary. In Australia I had spent much of my time with a young woman who had visited France just before the war and had gone down with a bad attack of what someone called 'French flu'. She babbled so fervently and persistently about France and Paris that she infected me with a perverse loathing for both. The fact nonetheless inexplicably remains. A hundred yards from the airport we passed a café ('Le Looping', with the two o's aerobatically askew to make the point clear) and puppy love overwhelmed me-puppy love from which this old dog has not yet shaken himself free. 'Le Looping' and the handful of unremarkable customers sipping their drinks on the terrace instantaneously bewitched me. I knew, with no rational justification, that I was in a country which for me was unlike any other country. It was as though some indigenous evangelist had caused me to be 'born again'. One life abruptly ended and another began. There and then I shed my twenty-five years. To this day, in my own head and heart I am twenty-five years younger than the miserable reality. The passengers in the airport bus were a drab lot. It was only eighteen months since the war had ended. There had not been much time to spruce up. In my besotted state, they seemed to me as fabulous as troubadours. The houses along the road were dismal little pavilions