Vagabond Wind, The Adventures of Anya and Corax

A tale of cat and mouse. A good old-fashioned adventure. A story for anyone who has wandered, lost and alone,or wishes they could. This is the tale of a girl called Anya Netherby who, with one rash decision, suddenly finds herself on the run. She has no one to turn to and nowhere to go. She wanders aimlessly, beginning to fear she has made a bad mistake, and with no idea how to put it right. Her luck begins to change when she befriends a wounded crow. One thing leads to another when the crow discovers an abandoned puppy, and an itinerant photographer reluctantly agrees to shelter all three of them for a night. After that, nothing is quite the same for Anya. She discovers that her homelessness is hardly unique. It is 1933, the middle of the Great Depression and, like her, hordes of people have taken to the road. She meets peddlers and tramps and hobos - for her, a new type of people, with different values and offbeat attitudes. Some have met their disappointments and failures by side-stepping them, others by confronting them head on. They ride the rails, they wrangle rickety trucks and horse-drawn wagons, they walk. For the first time, Anya sees people who have to struggle hard to survive: migrant families, lonely men, abandoned and orphaned children, and teen-agers by the thousands, all traveling the highways and byways of America. Anya comes to realize that to wander aimlessly is not pointless. A person may not know where she is going, but that doesn't necessarily mean she is doomed to failure. It is, in fact, how all important journeys begin.