A fragile, spoiled 12-year-old attending a private school in Kansas City and her family is thrown into the bleak, dangerous world of frontier homestead farming in 1902. She and her mother, brother, and sister find and care for a newly born, seemingly magical white buffalo calf while living on an eastern Colorado homestead with her Kansas- militia, veteran, amputee father of the 1900 Philippine Insurrection. She has a strong mother who was an army nurse. In a sod house the family lives through prairie fires, cyclones and being kidnapped by renegade Kiowa Native Americans. She becomes a self-confident young lady who will survive a world of hardships through good humor and a caring family. An American young man fighting muslim natives in the southern islands of the Philippines recovers from serious war wounds and shows the will to live in a peaceful world. This is a true story about how Americans can survive the pain of foreign wars and learn to live peacefully when they have the opportunity to achieve a goal of survival. Using the actual family history with "what may have happened," the whole family is molded by adversity, intuition and compassion for each other. The author creates a fascinating plot to portray the life of frontier homesteads. The addition of an albino bison, which becomes the main characters pet and is simultaneously a sacred creature to the local native Americans and adds special " magic "to the story. The book is very successful in telling a rousing, fast-moving, and compassionate story of a real family in the not-so-distant past. There is a poignant authenticity to the events. Will Payton has survived the war and life on the homestead with an amputated leg, Rose is an extremely capable mother, Brother Brud is at the brink of manhood and their little sister, Babe learns that there is a woodpecker in her papas leg.
About the Author: The late Evelyn Bowling and Don Bowling attended UCLA together with their two children after the Korean War. She and Don wrote The WHITE BUFFALO before her death and Don changed it to A WOODPECKER IN HIS LEG after remembering that he was one of the many 4 year olds to believe that his Grandpa had a bird in his leg. Don reprinted Evelyn's two books, VOICE POWER and AFTER YOUR FIRST SIX WORDS, I KNOW YOU. He then wrote EASY SIGHT SEEING, IN ROME, VENICE AND FLORENCE, ITALY after finding how difficult it was to climb marble stairs at Italy at 80 years old. Don retired as a special education teacher and administrator of the California Department of Developmental Services and enjoys living in San Francisco, today.