TREK

A debut novel offers an adventure that mystically and biologically connects two families separated in time by more than 30,000 years.

On a treacherously stormy night, Dr. Will Celestian is high in the Peruvian Andes, accompanied by his 12-year-old son, Skyler, and his guide, Gabriel. Will is about to make the discovery of a lifetime—a deep cave that was home to the first Stone Age humans to cross from the Siberian Steppe onto the American continents. Skyler is the one who spots the passage to the cave. He rappels down a tunnel leading to a vast space and is the first to look upon the cave walls. There, he and Will see a series of enormous murals that depict the more than 10,000-mile journey made on foot by one family in search of a new “hearth” to call its own. Jump back 30,000 to 35,000 years, and readers meet Ruachk, a great hunter somewhere on the Siberian Steppe. He is with his 5-year-old son, Sky, teaching him to hunt. They have trapped a wolf, but Sky refuses to kill it. He is “struck by the magnificence of the young wolf…the mournful look in its clear, yellow eyes.” He wants to set the wolf free and sketch it. Golden’s imaginative, vividly drawn narrative toggles between the past and present. Ruachk and his family fend off violent attacks from a variety of prehistoric predators and an especially venomous giant known as White Eye, who is part Neanderthal and part beast. Will battles modern enemies—a wife who leaves him and wants custody of the children, a university that stakes a claim to his discovery, and his own psychological demons. The central characters, especially Ruachk and Sky, are finely drawn, practically leaping off the page. And the author is meticulous in describing toolmaking, details of the extremely bloody hunts, and the ancient frozen, forbidding topography. But it is confusing that he consistently describes the trek from Siberia, across the long-since disappeared Beringia land bridge, into North America, as heading west rather than east.

An engrossing, magical, often violent, and tender tale, with one very captivating wolf.