The Rumptydoolers

"Rumptydooler" means "champion" in Australian slang. It is a word that comes to have an important meaning for Whit, a fifteen-year-old Eastern boy whose parents have been killed in an accident. For when he is taken by his Uncle Mike to his sheep ranch in Arizona, Whit finds himself confronting a whole new world. It is a world of shearing and branding and birthing and taking care of orphan sheep; a world in which half-breed and cowboy, Australian ranch hand and French sheepherder judge a "rumptydooler" not by what and where he comes from but by what he does. Here Whit, spoiled, lazy, contemptous, and resentful, learns truer values than those he has brought from home. And here he learns, too, on a harrowing two-hundred-mile trek to guide the sheep up treacherous mountain paths from the searing desert, what it takes to make a true champion, and how many real rumptydoolers he has come to know.
In The Rumptydoolers, Ester Wier, author of The Loner — listed as one of the hundred best books of the year by The New York Times, and runner-up for the 1963 Newbery Medal — has written a fast-paced, heartwarming, honest story of a boy's growing up, told against an unusual and authentic background.