When he is seven, Edgar Mint is run over by a mailman. Three months later, the half-Apache and mostly orphaned boy miraculously wakes from a coma. Thus begins an odyssey that will take young Edgar from a hospital for indigents to a prison-like school for Native Americans and on to the home of a dysfunctional Mormon foster family. But Edgar never forgets his goal: to find the mailman and let him know that he is alive and well.