Read the excerpt from …And Now Miguel. Then answer questions 1 through 7.

excerpt from ...And Now Miguel by Joseph Krumgold

[1] I am Miguel. For most people it does not make so
much difference that I am Miguel. But for me, often, it
is a very great trouble.
[2] It would be different if I were Pedro. He is my younger
brother, only seven years old. For Pedro everything is
simple. Almost all the things that Pedro wants, he
has—without much worry.
[3] It would be good to be Gabriel. He is also my brother,
and he is nineteen years old. Next to my Grandfather,
and my Uncle Bonifacio, and my Uncle Eli, and next to my father who is called Old
Blas, and my biggest brother who is called Young Blas and who wears a badge and
drives the school bus, Gabriel is the greatest man in the world.
[4] Everything that Gabriel wants, he can get. He explained this to me one Friday last
winter.
[5] All week long Gabriel goes to the high school in Taos, which is a very big town eight
miles away, of one thousand people and many stores that sell marshmallow candy.
This year Gabriel will graduate from high school. And that will be too bad for the
basketball team and the baseball team as well as for the Future Farmers of
America, a club of which he is president. From Monday to Friday Gabriel goes to
school and wins the games there and is a president. But on Friday he forgets all
these things and helps my uncles and my father with the sheep.
[6] In our family there is always one thing, and that is the sheep. The summer passes
and the winter comes and soon it is the time for spring; but all the time, no matter
when, there is the sheep. In our house we may be very happy. Like the time my
littlest sister, Faustina, was born. But these things they come and go. Everything
comes and goes. Except one thing. The sheep.
[7] For that is the work of our family, to raise sheep. In our country, wherever you find a
man from the Chavez family, with him will be a flock of sheep. It has been this way
for many years, even hundreds, my grandfather told me. Long before the Americans
came to New Mexico, long before there was any such thing here called the United
States, there was a Chavez family in this place with sheep. It was even so in Spain
where our family began. It is even so today.
[8] And so when Gabriel finishes school for the week, on Friday, he goes out to the
sheep camp. There he takes the place of one of my uncles or my father, and the
older man can come home for a day or two.
[9] In the winter we pasture our sheep on the big mesa that stretches from the cliffs on
the other side of our river, far, far north, flat and straight almost into Colorado. This
wide plain spreads out to the west to the Rio Grande river where there is a deep
arroyo, a great canyon that goes down, down into the earth to where the big river
flows. The land is owned by the Indians of the Taos Pueblo and my father pays the
war chief of these Indians ten cents every month for each sheep that we pasture.
We are very good friends with the Indians. It was not always so, my father tells me,
but now we are good friends.
[10] The sheep camp is built into a wagon, so that it can be moved as the sheep are
driven from where they have eaten to new pasture. It has a bed built in, and shelves,
and a stove. No matter how hard it snows or how cold it gets, inside the sheep
wagon it is always tight against the wind and dry and warm.
[11] On this Friday the wagon was in a place very near to the Rio Grande canyon, almost
twelve miles from our house. Gabriel went there with the pick-up truck, and he took
me along. Driving the truck is very hard. There are no roads. You drive right across
the mesa through the mesquite bushes, keeping away from the big holes and the
big rocks. It is wise to drive slow and be careful.
[12] But Gabriel did not drive slow, yet he was still careful. He swung the big truck from
side to side like it was a little stick, and all the time he sang a beautiful song about
a red flower.
[13] “Miguel,” he turned to me after he had finished with the song, “what’s up with you?
You haven’t opened your mouth since we left the house.”
[14] “Me?” I stopped looking at the bushes and the rocks. “As for me, I’ve been
thinking.”
[15] “About what?”

[16] “About how easy it is for you—.” Gabriel swung the wheel, and the truck skidded in
the snow away from a big hole. “Well, how easy it is for you—to be Gabriel.”
[17] Gabriel laughed. “Easier for me than anyone else in the world. After all, that’s who I
am.”
[18] “But it is not so easy for me—to be Miguel.”

[19] “Maybe not.” Gabriel smiled, watching the snow ahead. “It takes a little time. Wait a
year or two, and it’ll be easier.”
[20] “Only to wait? Isn’t there something else I can do? Like—practice?”

[21] “Being Miguel—it’s not like playing basketball. No, it’s a hard thing to train for.”
[22] The truck was going faster. Gabriel was looking through the windshield, his eyes a
little closed and tight, like he was looking into the wind. But now that we were
talking about such important things, there was much that I wanted to know.
[23] “There must be a secret! Some kind of a special secret, isn’t there?”

[24] “For what?” It was hard to talk now, the truck was roaring so much because we
were going so fast.
[25] “How to get to be a president.” I had to yell. “So easy. And when you want a deer,
you take a horse and in a day or two you come back with a deer. And the house?”
[26] “What house?” Gabriel yelled back at me.

[27] “The house by the cottonwood tree. You’re going to build such a house of adobe?”

[28] “Sure. Someday.”

[29] “And you’re going to become an engineer? At the college?”

[30] “Uh-huh.”

[31] “How?” I had to shout real loud. “How is all this done—so easy—to get what you
wish?”
[32] That’s the way it was with Gabriel. Everything that he wants he can get. With Pedro,
it is the opposite. Everything he has is enough.
[33] Both of them, they are happy.

[34] But to be in between, not so little anymore and not yet nineteen years, to be me,
Miguel, and to have a great wish—that is hard.
[35] I had such a wish. It was a secret and yet not a secret. For how secret can you
keep high mountains that one can see for hundreds of miles around, mountains
that face me when I first open my eyes every morning and are the last thing I see in
the night.
[36] This was my wish, to go up there—into those mountains that are called the
Mountains of the Sangre de Cristo.
Excerpt from …And Now Miguel by Joseph Krumgold, copyright © 1953 by Joseph Krumgold.
Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.