The First Encounter Summary

Hatter Fox is Marilyn Harris' novel of a seventeen year-old Navajo Indian girl living in New Mexico in the early 1970's. The story is one of isolation, alienation, and finally the redemption that comes when a young doctor befriends Hatter. The doctor has his own personal issues of disappointment and feelings of inadequacy until Hatter enters into his life.

The story is taken from the notebooks of Doctor Teague Summer and is based on his notes about a girl named Hatter Fox. Dr. Summer has never met Hatter Fox when he became a doctor at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1973. His opinion of this notorious girl is based on what he has heard from other people, who seem to blame everything from the bad economy to bad politics on this seventeen-year-old Navajo girl...