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Overview
Two boys, separated by the canyons of time and two vastly different cultures, face the challenges by which they will become men.
Coyote Runs, an Apache boy, takes part in his first raid. But he is to be a man for only a short time.
More than a hundred years later, while camping near Dog Canyon, 15-year-old Brennan Cole becomes obsessed with a skull that he finds, pierced by a bullet. He learns that it is the skull of an Apache boy executed by soldiers in 1864. A mystical link joins Brennan and Coyote Runs, and Brennan knows that neither boy will find peace until Coyote Runs' skull is carried back to an ancient sacred place.
In a grueling journey through the canyon to return the skull, Brennan confronts the challenge of his life.
From the Paperback edition.
Finding a skull on a camping trip in the canyons outside El Paso, Texas, Brennan becomes involved with the fate of a young Apache Indian who lived in the late 1800s.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
A psychic link is forged between a 19th-century Apache boy and Brennan, a 15-year-old on a camping trip who undertakes a grueling journey. ``Terse language keeps the story moving at a brisk pace,'' PW commented. Ages 12-up. Sept.School Library Journal
Cornered in a canyon during his first coming-of-age horse raid, a young Apache brave, Coyote Runs, is shot execution-style by soldiers from Fort Bliss. One hundred years later, Brennan Cole discovers a skull with a hole through its forehead in a canyon where he's been camping and becomes obsessed by the need to find out the who, what, and why of the skull. With the help of a pathologist, his high-school biology teacher, and someone from the Western Historical Archives in Denver, Brennan pieces the story together. The bond between the two boys, a century apart in time but so close in age and spirit, grows stronger as Brennan now searches for the final answer: why is Coyote Runs' spirit so restless, and what does it want of him? Brennan's realization that only when Coyote Runs' haunting and haunted soul is at peace will his own disturbed self find peace climaxes in his own coming-of-age challenge. Paulsen involves readers so deeply in the lives of both characters, telling the story in alternating chapters marked by the cadence and language distinctive to each boy and his time and place, that the whole becomes a compelling and dramatic experience that is powerful stuff. Although this is, at times, overwritten and affected--almost a parody of Hemingway--it will be new and unforgettable to today's readers. --Marjorie Lewis, Scarsdale Junior High School, NYFrom the Publisher
"Paulsen involves readers so deeply in the lives of both characters...hat the whole becomes a compelling and dramatic experience that is powerful stuff...New and unforgettable."—School Library Journal
"[A] deft and thought-provoking adventure novel."
—Booklist