Marcus and Melissa, secretly married, go to live in the high mountains of Montana, where Marcus is studying the mountain goats for the wildlife research station. His father, a hunter, hopes Marcus will show him where the goats are, so he can hunt them in the fall. The young couple track the goats and through Melissa's charts and Marcus' notebooks they begin to see that the goats have no natural predators except the mountains, and their unnatural enemy is man. Marcus goes down the mountain to tell his father that the goats must not be hunted. He and Melissa expect to be temporarily apart, but a misunderstanding between them leads to tragedy.
Author
Jean Craighead George wrote over eighty popular books for young adults, including the Newbery Medal-winning Julie of the Wolves and the Newbery Honor book My Side of the Mountain. Most of her books deal with topics related to the environment and the natural world. While she mostly wrote children's fiction, she also wrote at least two guides to cooking with wild foods, and an autobiography, Journey Inward. The mother of three children, (Twig C. George, Craig, and T. Luke George) Jean George was a grandmother who joyfully read to her grandchildren since the time they were born. Over the years Jean George kept one hundred and seventy-three pets, not including dogs and cats, in her home in Chappaqua, New York. "Most of these wild animals depart in autumn when the sun changes their behaviour and they feel the urge to migrate or go off alone. While they are with us, however, they become characters in my books, articles, and stories."
