Sixteen-year-old Titus Bass feared one fate more than any other: never to experience the great wilderness or the wildness inside himself. So late one night he snatched a squirrel gun and a handful of biscuits, fled into the woods, and never looked back. From Louisville past the Chicasaw bluffs and the Natchez Trace all the way to New Orleans, he plunges into the rough-and-tumble life along the banks of the Mississippi: a volatile, violent country of riverboatmen and river bandits, knife fights and Indian raids, strong liquor and stronger women. Yet beyond the great river stretches the vast, unexplored expanse of the Great Plains--and it is here that young Titus will seek his future ... and risk everything to seize it.