The Stripling

Twelve year-old Zack Sheridan’s family is brutally murdered by a psychopathic self-appointed lawman and his sons. Zack`s mother, as she lay dying, exacts a promise from him to escape the killers and take his five year-old sister Annie to their only surviving relative, his dad’s long estranged brother, Cooper, in Colorado. With her last breath, saying, “This is who you are,” she hands him a valued locket that may hold more than it appears.
Keeping his promise, and using the woodcraft taught to him by his mentor, Nokosi, a Civil War veteran who had died with the family, Zack and Annie begin a desperate travail of some seven hundred miles through a rugged, beautiful, and dangerous land to find their uncle.
The year is 1878. The land between northern Montana and Colorado is largely unsettled. Policed by scattered army patrols trying to deal with a combination of arriving settlers, unhappy Indians, and murdering outlaws, the land is anything but safe for Zack and Annie. And too, Mother Nature, in spite of her coquettish nature, can have a dark side…
This is more than a seven hundred mile horseback ride. It is a trip begun by a boy and completed by a man in the making. This is about personal growth, love, loyalty, and vengeance playing out against a backdrop of forgone but not forgotten romance.
So read on. Hunker down over a small fire in a blizzard, swim for your life across a raging river, be on the lookout for bears and bad guys, and above all, know how to use a gun. Enjoy.