After fourteen-year-old Andy slips away from his kayaking group to visit the wilderness site of his archaeologist father's death, a storm strands him on Admiralty Island, Alaska, where he manages to survive, encounters unexpected animal and human inhabitants, and looks for traces of the earliest prehistoric immigrants to America.

On a Caribbean cruise, sixteen-year-old Rosie meets a teenage Cuban baseball player seeking political asylum in the United States and tries to help him escape a charge of murder.