Once, before the sunrise, they had a game.

A beautiful game played on wildflower meadows that brushed the shores of great waters. Baggattaway was a sacred game, played for recreation and community, mercy and healing. They had played it for eons, whooping and running from village to village under the gaze of the gods, until the colonials landed and co-opted their game, removing the Indigenes to the sidelines for a long, silent age in which they have all but died out, their last numbers inert as upright fossils.

How the blood of these fossils would be stirred up if even a single inning of baggattaway (now known as lacrosse) could be played again. For the last time the fossils played the Creator’s Game was in the spring of 1763 when, during Pontiac’s Rebellion, the Chippewa and the Sauk staged a stunning ruse to retake an English fort on the Straits of Mackinac.

Best friends and Chippewa sons Birch Charlevoix and Neil Longbow LaSalle intend to reenact the famous ruse and to stir up that Native blood again. Aiming to honor the sport’s Native roots, they engineer a set of radical rules changes for the Lacrosse World Cup of 2010 and alienate every entrenched interest in the process. Under their proposal, players from all eight competing countries are to brandish original baggattaway sticks over hill and dale and to run borderless, miles-long meadows barefoot.

But not only rules changes. Birch and Neil also envision two swarms of buses carrying Native peoples from tribal lands in Oklahoma and South Dakota to their games, one hundred nine thousand Indigenes in a vast interstate caravan. Dubbed the All-Americans Tour, it mushrooms into a full-blown Indigene pilgrimage, a trail of tears in reverse, that draws an anxious and divided nation to the edge of its seat as the buses chug toward the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for the tournament.

Indian haters are aroused. The Establishment of the lacrosse world is threatened. The sport’s colonials are up in arms, defiantly opposed to the new rules. And the danger spills over into Birch and Neil’s personal lives, threatening the survival of the two friends. Age-old secrets come to the light of day, including one studiously shrouded by Neil concerning Birch’s wife Marla. All of this stands arrayed between Birch and his seemingly simple dream of Indigene remembrance