It is the year 1945, just after the testing of the atomic bomb. An eagle flies off in the distance, trying to avoid the fallout. She gets caught in the tail end of it as she heads east toward higher ground. Silas Livingston is a thirteen-year-old boy who lives on a small farm in New Mexico along with his single mom after his father was killed during the Normandy invasion.
Silas, an adventurous lad, is climbing Eagle Mountain, a notorious place with many sharp peaks and cliffs. Few people go there because it is so dangerous, but Silas knows every nook and grannie of the mountain. It is on one of these days that he goes high into the cliffs and finds an eagle nest with one egg. Next to the nest lies the dead mother eagle. Silas decides to take the egg home and hatch it in the chicken's incubator.
Along with his best friend, Betty Jo, who lives nearby, they hatch the baby eagle and raise it and train it to fly. They name him Solomon. But as the weeks go by, Solomon grows ten times the size of a normal eagle. And living in a small farm town where everyone knows one another, it's only a matter of time before the whole town finds out about Solomon. That's when the real adventure starts. Livestock go missing and the townsfolk blame the giant eagle. Now Silas and Betty Jo have to become junior detectives to find out who the real culprit is.
Mystery, adventure, and riding on the back of an eagle fill this story with fun and excitement.