After a long rail journey west, a Toronto businessman expects a quiet summer at his old college friend's Alberta ranch. Instead, he arrives amid troubling absences, a hostile band of settlers known as the Dreamers, and the memory of two friends who met their ends in the same remote hills. A wolf's terrible cry sends his horse over a precipice, while shadowy figures move across the mountainside and strange voices carry over a moonlit lake. Reunited with members of his fractured circle, he begins to trace the connections among a mysterious religious community, guarded ranch households, and the dangers gathering in the Cypress Hills. Every apparent kindness conceals a question, and every warning draws him deeper into a landscape where isolation can turn fear into certainty.
