In making the point that many stories (particularly by women) never get told, Larry McMurtry tells one that is well-worth sharing.
“In a tent (later a shack) not far south of our ranch house, in post oak scrub near the West Fork of the Trinity River, lived a woman who had (reportedly) been traded for a whole winter’s catch of skunk hides, the exchange occurring when she was about thirteen. The man who had her (by what right I don’t know) stopped to spend the night in the camp of a skunk trapper, who immediately took a fancy to the girl -- such a fancy, indeed, that he offered his winter’s catch for her. The traveler took the hides and left the girl, who lived to bear the trapper many children; she stayed down near West Fork for the rest of her life. When, as an old woman, she would occasionally need to go to town for some reason, she simply walked out to the nearest dirt road and stood, in silence, until some passerby picked her up and took her where she was going. This passerby was often my father, though sometimes it was the school bus I rode in. I rode to town with the old woman --once worth more than fifty skunk hides--many times but I never heard her speak a single word. She was through with talk…” p.19. (from Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Larry McMurtry).
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