Here are four men, representing the dominant cultures of the American Southwest, who set their feet upon trails which follow the physical and metaphysical journeys of their forefathers--the Pueblos Cornmeal Path, the Navajo Beautyway, the Spanish Way of the Cross, and the Yankee Trail of Destiny. All lead to the great fact of the past century, World War II, in which each man blazes his own trail in his countrys greatest crisis. Each carries to war his peoples pride and his fathers faith. Through the jungles of Bataan, the bloody battles of Tarawa and Iwo Jima, across the deserts of North...

Fleeing his plush decaying world and a marriage gone stale, Drake Cavanaugh is badly injured while staging his own death. Found unconscious, he is carried to the tiny Hispanic village of Descanso, high and remote in the mountains of New Mexico. Here, in this "forgotten pocket of God's overalls," begins his cure-physical, metaphysical, and intellectual. Here he becomes increasingly part of a strange world of saints and witches and ancient gods, of murder, mysticism, and miracles. And from here he eventually returns with a truth that is not what he sought. * * * * * Dorothy Cave spent much of...