Growing up as the only child of affluent and overprotective parents, Norma, troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination, searches for the truth, leading her to the blueberry fields of Maine, where a family secretis finally revealed.

In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, Rene Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a "seigneur," for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters -- barkskins. Rene suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a Mi'kmaw woman and their descendants live trapped between two inimical cultures. But Duquet, crafty and ruthless,...