Which Way Home?

Born a Native American, but brought up Amish, Hester Zug, at age 20, flees her Amish home. Her father’s too-tender care of her has made her stepmother wildly jealous, and so Hester sets off, knowing only that she can’t stay. Hester’s natural instincts for navigating the forests in colonial Pennsylvania along with the book of medicines and remedies given to her by an aged Native American woman allow her to survive until she gets sick from drinking river water.

Twice rescued—first by matronly Indian women who find her unconscious in the woods, and then by a boy in downtown Lancaster, where she’d been left for dead by the dreaded Paxton boys—Hester finds herself in the kind, if rough, hands of Emma Ferree. Because of her wide heart, Ferree, a widow, offers her home to fugitives.

The dazzlingly beautiful Hester eventually marries an Amish man, who is more in love with the way she looks than with her heart and mind. And when that childless marriage falters, she is met one day in the fields by Running Bear, a Native American brave who has watched her for years. He asks her to marry him, giving her until wintertime to decide.

Belonging in part to two worlds, but experiencing a subtle yet clear rejection from both, Hester comes to wish that her Amish mother, Kate, had never rescued her.