Like birds blown off course, the characters in these stories need a place to roost-somewhere to settle long enough to repair their ragged hearts-and they find it near the banks of the mythical Sissipahaw River. In the centerpiece story, an eighteenth-century Eno Indian tells of the fiery fate of his adopted father, English explorer John Lawson. In the surrounding stories, the age-old conflicts between newcomer and old-timer play out as twenty-first...