"The American Revolution has ended. The District of Maine remains a part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Deep in these north woods, a young man, a boy, really, who has never been away from his home in Sheepscott Great Pond, sets off at his mother's urging to search for a person he has never met. His travels quickly lead him into a series of startling entanglements and adventures and, providentially, into a friendship with a nomadic parson with a seafaring past whose humble intelligence and steady head prove useful when Peter Loon finds the world away from home to be more dangerous and complex than he had ever imagined."--Jacket.