Two stories are bound together when the elderly, demented Harry Eide escapes his sickbed and vanishes into the wilderness that surrounds the town of Gunflint, Minnesota--instantly changing the Eide family, and many other lives, forever. He'd done this once before, more than thirty years earlier in 1963, fleeing a crumbling marriage and bringing along Gustav, his eighteen-year-old son, pitching this audacious, potentially fatal scheme as a reenactment of the ancient voyageurs' journeys of discovery. It's certainly something Gus has never forgotten. Now--with his father pronounced dead--Gus relates their adventure in vivid detail to Berit Lovig, who'd spent much of her life waiting for Harry, her passionate conviction finally fulfilled over the last two decades. So, a middle-aged man rectifying his personal history, an aging lady wrestling with her own and with the entire saga of a town and region they'd helped to form and were in turn relentlessly, unforgettably formed by.