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Chapter 18
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Little Britches, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fathers, Sons, and Growing Up
Honesty and Pride
Work and Society
Community, Resources, and Conflict
Home and the American West
Summary
Analysis
Ralph and his family all help to harvest the beans and peas. While the children are at school, Ralph’s father flails the crops, and then in the evening the children help thresh them using the winnower. The crops prove poor, however, with many of the beans and peas either frozen or too small. The threshing process is also a dusty one, exacerbating Ralph’s father’s cough. The pheasants prove to be a problem too, eating pounds of the peas every morning. Remembering how good the pheasant tasted, Ralph decides to lay his steel trap for one on top of the pea stack.
Ralph and his family work together to harvest and thresh their crops, illustrating the necessity of collective effort. The Moody family’s brief stint of prosperity seems to have come to an end, and every hand is now needed if their large family is to feed itself. This new atmosphere of desperation and necessity has an impact on Ralph. When the pheasants begin eating their already diminished pea crop, he decides to set his steel trap on the pea stack in the hopes of catching one. By his logic, catching a pheasant kills two birds with one stone—food and crop protection—without necessarily breaking the law.
Themes
The next morning, Ralph finds a cock pheasant in his trap. His parents debate whether it was right of him to set one, with his father saying it’s against the spirit of the law and his mother pointing out how good the pheasant tastes. Ralph is unsure whether to lay a trap for the next night and asks at dinner whether he should put a stake in his steel trap to keep the pheasants from flying off with it. His father says yes, and Ralph continues setting his trap, catching a pheasant every day until the threshing is finished. When they finish winnowing, Ralph’s father evaluates their efforts, saying that at least half is salable.
Ralph’s trapping of the pheasant sparks a fierce moral debate, with his father contending that Ralph’s actions defy the spirit of the law and his mother arguing more practically in favor of the good meat the pheasant provides. However, when Ralph indirectly asks permission to set another trap—strategically giving his father plausible deniability—Ralph’s father grants his consent, prioritizing the immediate needs of his family above his own theoretical moral concerns.
Themes
Ralph goes back to school after threshing, so he’s not around while his father breaks the new horse. He lets Ralph name him, however, and Ralph chooses “Billy.” For the rest of the winter, Ralph does little else besides go to school and sort through beans while their mother reads to them. On Saturday, Ralph and his father winnow a sack of oats. On Monday, Ralph’s father brings them to the mill at Littleton and returns with half a sack filled with oatmeal.
A semblance of normalcy returns to the Moodys’ lives, though signs of Ralph's family’s economic challenges persist, such as their modest oatmeal yield.
Themes
