Your knowledge, conscious and subconscious, arises out of one quantum entanglement after another and you are connected with all things there from.
--Thomas Elliott in Garden of Heaven
David Ward grows 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."
Jayee, his utilitarian grandfather--who speaks the language of Earth--wants him to work the ranch and sign on with the Great Northern Railway. Katoya, his mystical grandmother--who speaks the language of Heaven--wants him to become a teacher. As he grows older, David loses his fluency in both languages.
When he climbs the sacred mountain of visions at 19, David is weighed down with two medicines: Píta, the Golden Eagle of Earth tears him off the mountain top and flings him back down onto the prairie; Sikimí, the black horse of dreams, carries David through images of his future and then leaves him for dead on the side of the road in the mountain's shadow.
David's journey carries him into the mountains where he meets his first and most dangerous lover; to the summit of Chogori, the world's most difficult mountain, with mentor Tom Elliott; to a Navy aircraft carrier during the Vietnam war; to Hawai'i where he climbs with a man he saw die while riding Sikimí years earlier and where he will meet Siobhan, his soul, the Kahuna who will attempt to save him from the worst of his present and his past; to a corrupt Midwestern college where Eve conjures him out of the mist and awaits him with murder in her heart on Moon Hill, and where he will lose his wife and daughter, his reputation and quite possibly, his life.
