Barnaby Skye, a pressed seaman in the Royal Navy, jumps ship at Fort Vancouver in 1826 with little more than the clothes on his back and a belaying pin for a weapon. Fighting for life, starving, hiding from his pursuers--the Hudson's Bay Company and the British Navy--he follows the Columbia River inland toward a fate he never anticipated. In a trapping brigade, Skye falls in with legendary mountain men such as Jim Bridger and Tom "Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick and in the fabled Rocky Mountains finds another unexpected turn in his life when he meets the Crow maiden, Many Quill Woman, who will become his wife.