Before You Begin

Before you begin.

At dusk in the northern California redwoods, Teresa rides into the Carquinez Woods carrying exhaustion, danger and a secret she cannot safely take back to the settlements. There she encounters Low Dorman, a young man whose knowledge of the forest makes its immense silence feel less like wilderness than a refuge with its own laws. Their uneasy alliance begins with a night fire, a wounded bear and the sense that someone is already searching for them.

Bret Harte sets this short novel at the edge of Gold Rush California, where mining camps, river traffic and rough frontier authority press against a landscape older and more patient than any of them. The redwood grove is not merely scenery: it is a shelter, a hiding place and a test of what its visitors can become when ordinary social rules no longer hold.

First published in 1883, In the Carquinez Woods brings together flight, companionship and moral choice in one of Harte's characteristic California worlds. This illustrated edition introduces its people, paths and objects without giving away the turns ahead. Each chapter's visual recap unlocks only after that chapter has been read.