A Navajo family welcomes a new baby into the family with love and ceremony, eagerly waiting for that first special laugh. Includes brief description of birth customs in different cultures.

In September 1944, eleven-year-old Billie lives with her great aunt, Doff, eagerly waiting for her older brother Leo to return from boot camp, and desperate to find the father that left when she was little; but Leo brings a friend with him, a Navajo named Denny, and the injured dog they have rescued and named Bear--and when the two young men go off to war, Bear becomes the thread that ties them all together, and helps Billie to find a true friend....

After being taught in a boarding school run by whites that Navajo is a useless language, Ned Begay and other Navajo men are recruited by the Marines to become Code Talkers, sending messages during World War II in their native tongue.

While visiting a Navaho Indian reservation in New Mexico, the Aldens try to save a forest under threat of development by proving it is the site of a lost, buried village, but someone is sabotaging their dig.

Describes each month of a year in the life of an eleven-year-old Navajo girl, Alice Yazzie, from January, Yas Nilt'ees, to December, Nilch'itsoh.