So, at the end of the last volume, we found ourselves filled with deep and terrible misgivings for the future of our vulnerable band. Turns out I had nothing to worry about! Absolutely nothing bad happens to anyone in this book. All journeys are brief and easy. All sojourns safe and comfortable. All dilemmas resolved with wisdom, all heart's desire fulfilled, all children grow strong and beautiful and above average, all disputes settled with civilised words over cups of hot tea. The buffalo roam, the Mexicans prosper, the Indians thrive, the Europeans bring peace and plenty wherever they settle.

All amazingly unexpected developments in a Larry McMurtry novel! One would, perhaps, have anticipated further hardship and cruelties to plague our adventurers, to have the heart torn out of the novel and out of the reader in one flat, brief page of devastating mortality right at the dead centre of the book, from which there can only be long, lingering, spiraling fall towards an ending. Even that's not enough, and random horror begets an explosion of bloody, vengeful, sin-killing violence that lays grief on grief. Or it would if McMurtry had written more or less true to form and not produced the passages of bucolic bliss and happiness, instead of delivering the surviving frail and ravaged community of people, united in sharing a brimful of human suffering, to a more or less safe end, forever altered by their experiences of America in her birth-pangs and a landscape in its death-throes.

Lalalala.