About This Book
Patrician Boston doctor Cabot W.W. Chase has made a bargain with his granddaughter Lily. He will pay all her expenses through Harvard Medical School if at the end of her studies she will spend a year on the Navajo Reservation Indian Hospital, where he had been a doctor following WWII. She is reluctant, suspecting her grandfather has emotional ties to the Navajo, but agrees. Slowly she acclimates herself, coming to admire the people and her surroundings. Lily, now known as Cabot, meets a young Navajo lawyer,Nicholas Nakai, who is running for the seat in the newly mandated United States Congressional district. She is drawn to him, yet finds it difficult to picture herself with an Indian man. As their relationship deepens, Nicholas tribal elders become alarmed at his liaison with the white doctor; they prefer to have him take a Navajo wife to Washington. They go to Cabot and tell her she must leave the reservation. Broken hearted, she returns to Massachusetts. Woven into the main story is the tale of Daago, a Navajo headman s daughter, and how she is won in a poker game by Captain Nathaniel Cabot, medical officer of the Army of the West in 1862, and how she kills him to escape, only to later bear his child, Kaab t. Unknown to Cabot and Nicholas, they discover Kaab t is their common ancestor.
