Okay, so you go back in time and, sidestepping the rules, you mess up the future. What do you do now? I suppose it would depend on what it was you messed up. If it were only a small thing, misplaced a watch, broke a wagon wheel, spoke to the wrong person, you could probably fudge it over and get out of "time", back to your own era and hope for the best. But if you stopped someone from being born, that's another story altogether. That's the problem a time tourist faces in On Eagle's Wings by Rebecca Goings.

Shannon Phillips is trying to get to her grandfather's cabin to escape a marriage to a cruel and hateful man. She has gone so far at to hire Otis Pratt, a man reeking of whiskey and sweat, but owning a rickety wagon, to take her there. When he gets her out in the middle of nowhere, thinking there is no one else around, Pratt decides to collect his payment for his services in a manner other than in cash. Lucky for Shannon there is an Indian Brave watching from a low rise nearby, or is it lucky? Shannon wonders if being the captive of the savage would be better or worse than being raped by the disgusting man she hired.

Lucky for the brave, Eagle's Wing, Shannon chooses to take his side when Otis decides to shoot him. She grabs the rifle, and receives a punch in the face for the missed shot. Eagle is compelled to rescue her from Pratt. What else can he do? But the full-blood Cheyenne is not exactly from Wyoming, at least not for anther three hundred years. He's a time tourist who loves to get back to the simplicity of his family roots. Now he's broken the rules, discovers that he's changed history, and not in a small way. He is compelled to fix the shift he created but in order to do that, Shannon Phillips needs to become pregnant. What's a time tourist to do now?

Rebecca Goings has written a cleaver story with a new twist on the "changing the future" issue of time travel. If the traveler decides to correct the shift he created before he returns to his own time, that adds a new dimension of pressure for him. No, it's not someone else's problem. Shannon is naïve in the proper sense of 1866 Wyoming. Eagle's Wing is torn between his growing desire for the girl and the duty of what he must do before returning to his own time in 2166. The emotional conflict is well documented and inspiring.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading On Eagle's Wings, so much so that I went on the hunt for Ms Goings' backlist. If you like time travel, the old west, and a sweet love story, On Eagle's Wings is a book you must read.

Reviewed by MargeAnna Conrad
© March 2008