Louis Braille was just five years old when he lost his sight. He was a clever boy, determined to live like everyone else, and what he wanted more than anything was to be able to read. Even at the school for the blind in Paris, there were no books for him. And so he invented his own alphabet--a whole new system for writing that could be read by touch. A system so ingenious that it is still used by the blind community today.

The author tells of her grandfather's experiences as a boy living in a lodge deep in the woods in Ontario, Canada. It relates how people and animals joined together to survive a forest fire and how it affected his life.