It is 1960s Minnesota and Reuben Land, an asthmatic boy obsessed with the legends of the Wild West, is eleven when schoolyard bullies break into the house His big brother Davy guns them down and is arrested But shortly afterwards he absconds from jail and goes on the run Rube, his father, a widowed school custodian, and Swede, Rube's younger sister and a precocious writer who crafts epics of romantic Western outlawry, hit the road after him They swerve this way and that across Minnesota and North Dakota, determined to find their outlaw