Ray McCreary is a Vietnam vet, just forty, with inclinations -- startling to himself -- to settle down, marry the woman he thinks he loves, and have a child. He sets out on a journey to seek a kind of closure with a past lover and with Bullet, the buddy who got him through the war but who can't shake a lingering agitation. Not sure where he's going or what he'll find when he returns to the old Virginia schoolhouse he shares with Vivian, Ray is nonetheless driven into one last round of adventure, a quest for what he might be missing or what he might want to give up. With an eye for natural and human hazards -- copperheads and buffalo, the violence of men who never find their place, the shadow of the war -- Sydney Blair captures perfectly the eternal despair of some vets, the slow healing of others, in this moving novel.