The story and discoveries of five young boys growing up in the 1950's in a small town located at the foot of Georgia's Pine Mountain and right dab in the middle of Georgia's vast and might Pine Woods. All this and on the Flint River too. One of the boys most enjoys observing nature and in doing so learns lessons so profound that they can only be described as enlightened wisdom. In one incident, he finds deep in a cave a colony of bats with an albino sentinel hanging upside down, outside the colony - rejected by the society because it is white. Yet the freakish blue eyed bat nevertheless watches over and serves the colony. Animal behavior, learns the boy, explains the actions of his human friends -- who vie for power in the group. Critics say it is dangerous to say any book is "in the tradition of", but in this case we must think of Loren Eiseley and Henri Fabre and Joseph Wood Krutch, who also observed Nature as philosophical enlightenment and keys to human nature.