Having patrolled Yosemite for more than two decades, author and park ranger Shelton Johnson delivers this fictionalized tribute to its healing grandeur. Born in 1863 to a sharecropping family of black and Indian blood, Elijah Yancy becomes a Buffalo Soldier in the U.S. cavalry. Ultimately finding his way to the newly created Yosemite National Park in 1903, he basks in the freedom of its pristine splendor—with little beyond mountain light, campfires, and stars. “An engaging and poetic meditation on what it means to be truly free.” —Booklist