THE WOLF PIT offers a gripping portrait of two young Virginians forever altered by violence and civil war. Robin, a young Confederate soldier, battles from a valley of blood to a burning wilderness to labyrinthine trenches. He clings-despite the slaughter of friends and illusions-to what gives him strength, to the beautiful and the uncanny: family pictures, Psalms and an old tale about a pair of mysterious green children found in a wolf pit. Robin carries these inside the very palisades of hell, the Elmira prison camp. Agate, the daughter of a hired-out slave, embraces the forbidden teachings of her mistress, Miss Fanny. But the images she has fashioned for herelf shatter when she encounters and deeply offends her owner, Young Master. At the Williams Home Place, Agate learns the meaning of her mother's cautionary tales as she struggles to survive loss and degradation and to put knowledge and truth against evil.