It is 1704. Mercy Carter lives in Deerfield, Massachusetts - an English settlement in a divided continent. Death is always close at hand - death from the weather, from the French, and from the Kahnawake Indians. It is a brutal place. And it's about to get worse. When a group of Kahnawake raids Deerfield one icy night, Mercy is captured, with hundreds of other settlers, and dragged by the Indians on a long, long trail to the unknown north. They walk until their feet bleed and their spirits are bowed. They walk with little food, for forty days and nights, three-hundred miles to a Kahnawake village. Some of them don't make it that far - and many of those who do would rather have died on the way. A new life lies in wait. But is it slavery - or a kind of freedom? Mercy, along with her fiercely religious, fiercely English family, had always thought of the Indians as savages. But as she begins to live their life, she becomes one of them...