“He sneaked one last look at his father. The terror returned full force. How could this…wrinkled, shrunken shell of a human being be his father?”

After years of searching, Cloyd Attcity finally locates his missing father, Leeno, in a Navajo hospital. Leeno is brain-dead from a traffic accident, but his body is still alive. Cloyd feels horrified to meet his missing parent in this way. The boy’s dream of a family reclaimed, its meaning restored, now lies dying on a hospital bed.

“Cloyd slipped through the orchard and vanished among the tall trees, then began to climb. He didn’t know he was climbing toward a treasure and a turning point. He wanted only to reach that piece of desert in the sky.”

Something calls Cloyd into the mountains. He senses that his life’s purpose lies there. It can’t be found amid the meaningless boredom of his life in a group house or at a dull school whose knowledge means nothing to him. His future lies somewhere else—higher up, above this canyon.

“All winter in Durango as Cloyd sat in one classroom, then passed like a sleepwalker at the bell to the next, his spirit roamed the canyons with the flock. He put out of his mind now his other dream, the one he used to live for, the one that had turned into the man in the hospital bed in Window Rock. White Mesa was his whole world now.”

Cloyd hates his life and instead dreams of the happy times with his grandmother and the world of canyons near his ancestral home. Cloyd’s soul rebels at dreary modern life; it yearns to find something meaningful and deeper from his people’s past that still echoes in his heart. He’s on his own but doesn’t know how to be himself. Instead, he knows only how to run away from what adults think he should be.