A Vision Quest to Heal Mother Earth

The Fifth World is profusely illustrated with Native American style pictures. The story line is long but does keep one's interest.

Leaving the traffic of Santa Fe behind, Meredith Markey drove with intense concentration. A tall sturdy woman with short blonde hair hanging stubbornly over one eye, she steered her hybrid SUV up the steep mountain road in New Mexico. Her medicine bundle lay on the seat beside her.

As she passed through Los Alamos, where she worked as a high desert ecologist, she caught a glimpse of the old Manhattan Project barracks atop a hill and shuddered as images of killer nuclear destruction swam into her mind.

Now the National Laboratory was developing peaceful solutions, making enormous progress toward saving energy and reducing the pollution which caused global warming. A researcher like herself should feel good about that, but somehow all she felt was apprehension.

Speedily she pushed ahead until all the towns were far behind her.

Turning her attention inward, she realized that she was troubled by a foreboding, something dreadful churning within herself, wanting to surface. What was it? Something she had dreamed about. Something she held locked inside her. She hadn't felt this unsettled since her parents disappeared ten years ago in a landslide of gravel and stone.