KANAWHA: THE HUNT

Setting & Plot: Two years have passed since the events of the first novel. Jem, Meg, and their two-year-old child are relentlessly hunted through the rugged Appalachian gorges by a mercenary commando dispatched from London by the House of Greystoke, led by the ruthless Captain Nicholas Thorne and the calculating inquisitor Gideon Cole.Near the Cayuga palisade, the mercenaries are ambushed and captured by native warriors. Weathered by the freezing wilderness, with dark skin, long hair, and buckskin attire, Jem seamlessly blends in among the Cayuga. To permanently put an end to the hunt and prevent the House of Greystoke from appealing to the British Crown to deploy regular "Redcoats" into the mountains, Jem and the Cayuga Chief Kaelen execute a clever deception: - They exhibit Jem's original logging pickaxe as a trophy recovered in the woods;- They lead Thorne and Cole to three old, frozen graves in a desolate canyon;- They claim that Jem and Meg perished during the mountain crossing and that the child was killed by a cougar.Fooled by the ruse, Thorne and Cole return to the coast as unwitting messengers of the fugitives' deaths. With all searches officially called off in London, Jem, Meg, and their child are finally free, setting off toward the uncharted Northern Great Lakes.