In 1943, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement on northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy fatally mistakes the local constable’s girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives - to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto - pursued over the years by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them and distantly watches over them like a vast, idiosyncratic guardian………….
