“Those are mammoths,” Robbie told him. He’d been doing extra reading on the North Plains ever since he found out we’d be living there, and he enjoyed showing off his new knowledge to the rest of us. “They used to be all over North Columbia, but when the first settlers came from the Old Continent, they killed all the ones in the East. Well, almost all. Peter said he saw a man once who’d caught one and tamed it and rode it like a horse.”

“You can’t ride a thing as big as a house!” Cousin Bernie said with magnificent scorn.

“They do it with elephants in India,” Hugh said. “They don’t ride them the way you’d ride a horse; they strap a sort of carriage seat to the elephant’s back, and four or five people can sit in it at once and ride.”

“I bet a mammoth could carry ten people!” Robbie said with enthusiasm.

“Maybe twenty!” Bernie said, abandoning his objections in favor of such an interesting alternative. “Maybe you can catch one, Robbie!”

“It would have to be a small one,” Robbie said thoughtfully. “Young, I mean. So you’d have time to train it up.”

“Catching even a small one would be hard,” Jack put in. “Since they’re so big.”

“You could do it if you dug a big pit, and it fell in,” Bernie said.

“How would you get it out again?” Robbie objected. “They’re awful heavy. You’d have to get someone with lots of magic to do it. Maybe more than one.”

“Have you got a better idea?” Bernie said.

I could see the boys were going to spend the rest of Cousin Bernie’s visit arguing about mammoth traps, so I left and went upstairs. Mama and Aunt Tilly were visiting in the parlor, and I didn’t want to have to sit straight and be quiet while they went on about what to take for housekeeping and what to leave behind.

Things went on like that for the whole month, and then, suddenly, all our belongings were gone and it was time for us to leave as well. Mama helped me pack a trunk all my own, and pasted a silhouette of me on it that she’d cut out of black paper, so that everyone would know it for mine. Then there was an enormous party, with Grandfather and all the aunts and uncles and cousins, even Uncle Earn and Aunt Janna, though they came late and left early.