Damaris Moore keeps having a recurring dream of being chased through a dark forest by unseen demons prodding her with pointed sticks as she runs for a large beech tree, seeking the shelter of its overhanging branches that seems to offer her sanctuary. Always at this point, she wakes up. But is it only a dream? Or is it infinitely more frightening: an out-of-body experience in which she is travelling back in time to be someone else, before she was even born? On each succeeding night the dream becomes more and more real. Suddenly, on Thanksgiving Day, she is twice drawn back into it, and realises she is occupying the body of a blood relative she was named after - one of the settlers who arrived from England on board the Mayflower and made their home in the "New World" - who is being chased by the same demons through the same forbidding forest. A young girl in love with the young chief of a neighbouring Native American tribe, except, unlike Damaris, her descendant gives without reserve, even to putting her life at risk for the sake of her lover's...and in so doing reveals to Damaris the meaning of true love. But if her young namesake and her lover escape the dangers facing them, and if Damaris is then returned to her own time, will she still be her old guarded self? Or will the experience be enough to change her when she meets a stranger in similar need?