Having patrolled Yosemite for more than two decades, author and park ranger Shelton Johnson delivers this fictionalized tribute to its healing grandeur. Born in 1863 to a sharecropping family of black and Indian blood, Elijah Yancy becomes a Buffalo Soldier in the U.S. cavalry. Ultimately finding his way to the newly created Yosemite National Park in 1903, he basks in the freedom of its pristine splendor-with little beyond mountain light, campfires, and stars. 'An engaging and poetic meditation on what it means to be truly free.' -Booklist