Part timber wolf, Jim Ugly is a proud and aloof one-man dog. And that man is Jake's father, an actor in the raffish world of the frontier West. When he suddenly disappears, the boy and the dog are thrown into an uneasy alliance on a wild, helter-skelter journey to the Sierra Nevada mountains and San Francisco. Here is Newbery winner Fleischman at his finest, in a book full of comic surprises and swift adventure.