Shadow Hunter

Sealed inside their Choctaw all-terrain cruiser, untouched by the clear mountain air, Frank Drager and his son, Ronald, rappel down a canyon wall. Their vehicle, agile as a spider and keen as a wolf, scans for the rare wild animals preserved for the most privileged sportsmen. As the shadows lengthen, thirteen-year-old Ronald Drager takes his first tentative steps into the wilderness... and disappears.
In the comfortable North American hive of supermalls, feel-good drugs, and computer-guided traffic patterns, the Drager "hunting accident" becomes a media event and a public outragean unsettling threat to a predictable, micro-managed world. The search begins for Ronald, but only in the highest realms of government does anyone suspect the truth: the boy is the captive of a secretive, cave-dwelling people, fleeing with them to the desolate southern reaches they inhabit.
The Drager tragedy is the most publicized of recent unexplained disasters - pestilential swarms, super-resistant viruses, animal attacks, neurological breakdowns. It is enough to resuscitate a languishing political party bent on eradicating all such unregulated, "natural" events. Pressured by a fearful public, insurgent zealots and a ruthless media wizard, the ruling government prepares to launch a military thrust. The final goal is targeted: the end of Nature itself.
As carrion birds write messages in the sky and newscasters flash the stark images of a new kind of war, three top-flight agents track the Drager boy across a forbidding desertscape; the spin-meisters polish their requiem for a dead child; Ronald tastes the raw power of his unfolding destiny - and glimpses the fate of all living things.
Swift narrative drive and a superbly crafted plot distinguish Will Baker's visionary novel, in which the heart of darkness is the mysterious, devouring wilderness itself. Unreeling with the speed and vividness of a nightmare, Shadow Hunter points the way to a shockingly possible future.