Back when I was a small bookish child reading everything I could get my hands on, I read my way through my parents' shelf of Louis L'Amour westerns, and I absolutely loved this one. Featuring a child protagonist faced with a wilderness survival situation, Down the Long Hills was my very favorite, and I read it over and over.

And rereading it now, for the first time in probably 30 years or more, I can see why! The survival scenes and scenery descriptions are very tense and vivid, and it's a fun fast read. I think for me as an adult, the child protagonist is a bit young for the amount that he's capable of - he's seven; I think I would believe nine or ten more easily - but at the same time, I'm willing to accept adult characters doing a lot of unrealistic things, so why not a kid? It certainly appealed to me when I was only slightly older than the book's hero.

Down the Long Hills follows Hardy, a seven-year-old who ends up stranded in the wilderness with a younger child - a three-year-old orphaned girl - and his father's horse after the adults who are supposed to be looking after them are killed. With no other course of action, they set out for the fort where they have been told Hardy's father is, across plains, rivers, and mountains, with winter coming on. The narration cuts back and forth between the kids' struggle for survival, and several different groups of adults looking for them, some with helpful aims in mind, and some with other intentions.

I really enjoyed the kid protagonists, who have not only the usual problems of being lost in the wilderness such as trying to find food and shelter, but also have issues unique to their age; for example, Hardy is too short to get on the horse's back by himself unless he can find a bank or tree to climb on from. There is a post-apocalyptic element to their survival quest, as they not only try to scavenge food from nature but also, for example, steal items, stumble upon abandoned cabins, and the like.

I went into this braced for Period Typical Attitudes (Subtype: Western), and while there's definitely not none, honestly it's a lot better than I was prepared for. The book opens with a genre-typical "Indians massacre wagon train" scene (it's how the kids end up alone), and the background element of all the white characters being settlers in the West is built into the setup and taken as a given, but from there it's really not too bad given the givens - people may be friendly or unfriendly as individuals regardless of race, the book is aware that different tribes have different relationships with the local settlers and with each other, and while there is an element of Native Americans as threat throughout the book (with a commensurate lack of awareness of why exactly that might be), there's none of the, hmm, the ugly, dehumanizing language that can sometimes go along with this. The only characters who are portrayed as truly evil and awful are white, a pair of horse thieves who try to kill the kids and steal their horse.

So basically I enjoyed it a lot and may need to read some other old L'Amours. The only other one of his that I have around is another I remember liking at the time, Last of the Breed, which involves a modern-day survivalist type trying to avoid Russians in the wilds of Siberia.