It is the 1750s on the Great Plains where only natives and a few French Trappers live.

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This story is told in two voices. In the first storyline, Lince, a runaway slave in his mid-thirties, rescues a native woman from her captors. She slowly becomes the only friend he has ever known. In a parallel storyline, Hunter, a 19-year-old Snake warrior, along with his wolf, Shadow, joins his newly discovered brother in search of their long-thought-dead mother, not knowing she is the woman Lince rescued. 

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As their paths converge across the hostile wilderness— Lince's path from the Great River at the eastern edge of the plains and Hunter's from the towering Rocky Mountains at the western edge — they are drawn into a battle with a band of murderous renegades. It takes their tenacity and characters, such as Kills-In-The-Dark, Spirit Man, and Carries-His-Lion, to give them a chance to survive.

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