Trying it on the Dog

About the Book

Andrea (Andy) Farnsworth, a thirteen year old, slow to mature, Kansas tomboy is, at first, only forced to deal with a father who drinks too much and a mother who is bent on turning her into a young lady.   Then she meets Elmo Harkrider, another misfit who is seventy-four years old, bristly and taciturn, an antisocial hobo.  She is fascinated by his skill as a woodsman and his tales of a High Sierra Valley where "a man kin live off the land and be free, with no one ta say nought ta ´im."  After she gets into deep trouble at home and at school, she chases after him one night when he goes to hop a train out of town.  Although she manages to wind up in Elmo´s boxcar, she is soon made aware of the fact that he is a lifelong loner who doesn´t "cotton" to company.  As the train chugs away from her hometown of Riverdale, she knows she´s on shaky ground.  Her very survival depends on staying close to someone who doesn´t want her there.

And to make matters worse, she quickly learns that Elmo thinks she´s a boy.  Luckily, she has the wit not to correct this misconception for later on in the story, she discovers that he is a rabid woman-hater.

Andy bribes Elmo with the chore money she´s saved up over the years, offering to put up the money if they can go partners.  Because his supplies are "down ta scratch" and he can´t find work, he reluctantly agrees to "try it on the dog," explaining that when you don´t know if something is going to work, first you try it on the dog.  He makes it clear that this arrange- ment is only binding until the money and supplies run out.  Andy becomes obsessed with trying to get them to California before they run out of everything and hoping that he will invite her to accompany him to The Valley.

So, in the depressed year of 1937 when folks are still migrating west to look for work, they embark on an eighteen hundred mile journey, by train, truck, car, foot and river raft, fraught with conflict, danger and difficulty as well as moments of great joy, during which Andy´s and Elmo´s relationship fluctuates between respect for one another´s pluck and constant mis- understandings occasioned by Elmo´s prickly and intensely private nature.

Meanwhile, tormented with guilt regarding his treatment of Andy and fighting a drinking problem that gets him in trouble with his boss and the law, Charley Farnsworth, Andy´s father, sets out cross-country to find his daughter.

This is a journey of firsts for Andy:  first time riding the rails or a river raft, first time hitchhiking, harvesting, or being caught in a stampede, first awakening to the grandeur of nature, a first love, first kiss, first birth, first death.  Of the many people she encounters along the way, both malevolent and loving, the influence of a few has the power to change her life.  Emotionally, she travels far.  At the beginning of the story, she doesn´t even want to be a girl but after her travels with (irony of ironies) an inveterate woman-hater, she has learned the value of women and is able to embrace her own femininity.

About the Author

Alicia Smith is the mother of a grown son and daughter. She lives with her long suffering husband near San Francisco and commutes between there and a mountain cabin near Yosemite. After growing up a tomboy in the flatlands of Indiana, her first view of the towering Sierra Mountain Range had an impact which persists to this day.