Garden of Heaven

When nineteen-year-old David Ward climbs the sacred mountain Nináistuko seeking a vision, the golden eagle of earth flings him back onto the prairie and the black horse of dreams shows him the future. Though his eyes are opened, fate hides exactly what he needs to know.David has grown up on a Montana sheep ranch where bluebunch wheatgrass and rough fescue have long served, where the sky detests fences, where the seasons are task masters, where predators and gods strip the impractical from the bone. As life draws him away, he leaves with powerful lessons learned from his grandparents. Jayee, his utilitarian railroad man grandfather, has taught him the language of the plains. Katoya, his mystical Blackfeet grandmother, has taught him the language of the mountains. He soon loses his fluency in both. He meets his first love amongst Indian paintbrush and larkspurs in the high-country of the Garden of Heaven and then becomes separated from her on the far side of Florida's Crooked River in Tate's Hell Swamp. His life shatters into a kaleidoscopic puzzle.David begins finding the widely scattered pieces at the summit of Chogori, the world's most difficult mountain, and on an aircraft carrier deployed to the Western Pacific during the Vietnam War. Others lie upside down in Chicago, Hawai'i, the Philippines and the Netherlands. After he lands a teaching job at a small college in central Illinois, he suspects he was conjured there by a woman standing in the moonlight on Moon Hill. Siobhan, the wise woman in his life tells he will never understand what has happened to him until he can answer the question: "who tried to kill me and why?"As a "light-dancer," he remembers well the alchemists' guiding principle: "By fire is nature renewed whole." He suspects all paths lead to that point.