Samuel spots thick dark smoke rising from the direction of his settlement while hunting miles away in the woods.

Samuel finds his settlement burned to the ground and his neighbors killed, but discovers his parents' bodies are missing.

Samuel digs graves and buries each of the murdered settlers, says a brief prayer over them, and then sleeps.

Samuel reads the attackers' tracks at dawn and sets off in pursuit, calculating how far ahead the captors must be.

Samuel spots two native warriors adorned with fresh scalps near a creek and follows them toward the British camp.

Samuel tracks the two warriors to the British encampment where his parents are being held prisoner.

A rebel group attacks the British camp; Samuel emerges to help but is struck in the head with a tomahawk and loses consciousness.

Samuel wakes to discover a young rebel named Coop has been caring for him and hauling him on a litter for several days.

Hessian soldiers slaughter Annie Clark's parents at their farm and shoot at the fleeing girl; Samuel searches the woods for Annie.

Samuel and Annie are discovered by a traveling merchant named Abner, who hides them as his grandchildren when British soldiers pass.

Samuel stumbles into his mother on a New York street and the two quickly form a plan to rescue his father.

Samuel and Abner knock out the guard at the sugar mill and free Samuel's father along with dozens of other prisoners.

Samuel's family escapes across the river to New Jersey by boat with Abner's contact Matthew, with Samuel's father barely alive from starvation.

British soldiers on horseback confront Samuel on the road to Philadelphia, but American rebels ambush the soldiers and save the family.

Samuel returns alone to the untouched valley he first spotted the day his settlement was destroyed, finding peace there.

Samuel discovers his Pennsylvania settlement has been burned, his neighbors murdered, and his parents taken prisoner by British soldiers and their native allies. Using his tracking skills, Samuel pursues the captors across the war-torn frontier, surviving a violent skirmish and a near-fatal blow to the head before pressing on. Along the way, Samuel rescues an orphaned girl named Annie Clark and gains the help of a covert spy named Abner McDougal, whose civilian intelligence network helps them penetrate British-occupied New York. A chance encounter with his mother on the streets of New York sets the rescue in motion, and Samuel and Abner free Samuel's father from a sugar mill prison. The reunited family narrowly escapes back to freedom and eventually reaches Philadelphia, where Samuel cannot rest and returns to aid the rebel cause. After losing his friend Coop, Samuel finally finds peace in the untouched valley he first glimpsed the day everything changed.

Samuel's journey from attacked settlement to family rescue and hard-won peace.

A traveler named Isaac arrives at the Smith cabin bearing a newspaper with news of fighting at Lexington and Concord.

The settlers gathered at the Smith cabin debate the war news and agree to wait and see rather than take immediate action.

Samuel discovers that a settlement neighboring his own was also attacked and its residents slaughtered by the same raiding party.

Samuel finds the body of a man who had been picking berries along the trail and quickly digs a shallow grave for him.

Samuel reaches the destroyed settlement of Draper's Crossing and finds a traumatized old man singing an improvised song about the attack.

Samuel grabs ears of corn from a partially burned cornfield and eats ravenously while continuing his pursuit.

Samuel thanks Coop for saving his life and then leaves the rebel group behind to travel faster toward his parents.

Annie Clark catches Samuel attempting to steal a chicken and tells him to take the mean red one instead.

Caleb Clark tells Samuel his father's life was spared because a British officer found the family's chessboard and wanted a chess partner.

Abner frequently stops his wagon on the road to New York to hand out bandages and pain medicine to wounded refugees.

Samuel catches Abner and the farmer Micah exchanging knowing glances and realizes the two men are already well acquainted.

Abner and Micah attach a message to a carrier pigeon and release it to carry news of British troop movements to Philadelphia.

Abner asks his contact Matthew to take Annie as a daughter in case Abner and Samuel are captured or killed in New York.

Samuel's father receives food on the escape boat and declares of it, 'Like it? It's life itself.'

Abner privately warns Samuel that his weakened parents will instinctively try to lead him, but that Samuel must guide them all.

The story begins with news of the war arriving at Samuel's peaceful settlement, sowing fear and uncertainty among settlers who choose to wait rather than act. As Samuel pursues his captive parents, he encounters the widespread destruction left by the British campaign, burying strangers and witnessing traumatized survivors along the trail. His evening with the Clark family brings him food, warmth, and the crucial information that his father's chess skills were what kept him alive. The journey to New York with Abner reveals a hidden civilian intelligence network operating beneath the surface of the war, using carrier pigeons and trusted contacts to move information and people. After rescuing his father, Samuel's family is sustained by the generosity of allies who share scarce food, an act of enormous symbolic weight in the world of the novel. Throughout these moments, the true texture and cost of frontier life during wartime comes into vivid, human focus.

The smaller moments that shaped Samuel's war-torn journey.

Samuel takes careful aim at a deer in the woods but does not fire, his thoughts pulled away by news of a distant war.

Samuel runs eight miles back toward his settlement through darkening woods after spotting a vast column of smoke to the east.

Samuel finds the bodies of three small children among the murdered settlers and weeps over each one as he buries them.

Samuel sees two warriors wearing fresh scalps near the creek and feels, for the first time in his life, the desire to kill a man.

Samuel shoots and kills an Iroquois warrior in a split-second reflex, experiencing the act in slow motion and remaining deeply unsettled by it.

While unconscious from his head wound, Samuel has vivid hallucinations of his mother dressed in buckskins, caring for him and treating his injury.

Samuel and Annie reach a road junction; Annie refuses to be separated from Samuel and they agree together to head to New York.

Samuel discovers that Abner belongs to a wide covert network of civilians carrying intelligence, supplies, and refugees for the rebel cause.

Samuel enters New York City for the first time and is overwhelmed by its massive size, realizing his woodland skills are useless there.

Samuel's mother immediately trusts and obeys his escape plan when he encounters her on the street, deferring to his authority.

Samuel and Abner unlock the sugar mill door to find thirty to forty starving prisoners standing alongside Samuel's gaunt father.

Samuel's mother tells him he has fundamentally changed and grown, and that she might not recognize him if she did not know him.

Samuel's parents settle in Philadelphia and open a school to house and teach children orphaned by the war.

Samuel declares he must return to help others as strangers helped him, and his mother sides with him and declares him his own man.

Coop dies delirious and far from home of dysentery, and Samuel leaves the battle for good.

From the opening moment when Samuel cannot bring himself to pull the trigger on a deer, his fraught relationship with violence and death is established before being shattered by the war. Samuel's first kill and his feverish hallucinations while unconscious show the psychological toll of his journey, while each decision he makes reveals a growing moral clarity and authority. As Samuel enters the alien world of New York City, he realizes that woodland skills alone cannot save his family and that he must rely on relationships and trust instead. The rescue itself brings its own revelations: the horrifying scale of British prisoner neglect, and the ease with which his mother falls in behind his leadership on the street. In Philadelphia, Samuel cannot ignore the pull of duty, and his mother's public recognition of his autonomy marks the final passage into adulthood. Coop's terrible death closes that chapter and sends Samuel back to the woods, where the peace of the wilderness finally holds.