In 1976 a man driving a sports car was stopped by a Georgia State Trooper at three in the morning on an old highway between Atlanta and Columbus. The trooper was shot dead and the driver fled on foot into the Great Pine Woods. A few hours later a manhunt was launched. A manhunt -- that most terrifying of adventures for both the hunters and the pursued. This is the story of the man who fled the scene so boldly and so foolishly, the manhunt with its clockwork precision, and the men who took weapons into the forest when the prey was finally at bay. It is necessarily an appalling story told in ghastly detail and intimate horror -- because it was a manhunt. It is neccessarily vicious and bloody because it is true. I know. I was there.

The story and discoveries of five young boys growing up in the 1950's in a small town located at the foot of Georgia's Pine Mountain and right dab in the middle of Georgia's vast and might Pine Woods. All this and on the Flint River too. One of the boys most enjoys observing nature and in doing so learns lessons so profound that they can only be described as enlightened wisdom. In one incident, he finds deep in a cave a colony of bats with an albino sentinel hanging upside down, outside the colony - rejected by the society because it is white. Yet the freakish blue eyed bat nevertheless watches over and serves the colony. Animal behavior, learns the boy, explains the actions of his human friends -- who vie for power in the group. Critics say it is dangerous to say any book is "in the tradition of", but in this case we must think of Loren Eiseley and Henri Fabre and Joseph Wood Krutch, who also observed Nature as philosophical enlightenment and keys to human nature.