"A young man wakes up at dawn to drive to the Andes, to climb the Cerro Bonete--a mountain untouched by ice axes and climbers, one of the planet's final mountains to be conquered--as an act of heroic bravado, or foolishness. But instead, he finds himself dragged, by the undertow of memory, to Esplanada, the neighborhood he grew up in, to the brotherhood of his old friends, and to the clearing in the woods where he witnessed an act that has run like a scar through the rest of his life. Back in Esplanada, the young man revisits his initiation into adulthood and recalls his boyhood friends who formed a strange and volatile pack..."--