The Boy in the Cottonwoods: What the Ground Knows

Nine-year-old Tom Avery knows exactly two kinds of people: the family he loves, and everyone else.
Then in one terrible afternoon on the Oregon Trail, that certainty burns away with his parents' wagon.
The men who killed them wore paint and rode like Cheyenne warriors. So when a Northern Cheyenne scout named Long Step finds Tom hiding in the cottonwoods along Horse Creek, Tom is sure he already knows exactly what kind of danger he is in.

But Long Step sees something Tom doesn't: tracks that don't add up, horses shod the wrong way for a war party, and a search through the family's belongings that looks less like a raid and more like someone hunting for something specific.
Taken in by a family he is certain he should fear, Tom must learn a harder skill than survival. He must learn to look before he decides what he is seeing, to listen before he judges, and to ask whether the story in his head is the one the ground is actually telling.
Because somewhere in what is left, sewn into the lining of his own coat, is the first real clue to who his parents' killers were. It has been there all along.
The Boy in the Cottonwoods is Book One of What the Ground Knows, a historical mystery-adventure series for readers 9-13 who love survival stories, real history, and mysteries solved by paying close attention.

The tracks don't lie. Fear does.