Nathaniel Fitzgeraldson was once a rich merchant from Boston, Massachusets. Grown tired of his life, he abandoned his job and strarted traveling in the midwest, in search of adventures, becoming a hunter and a trapper.

One day, while he was passing in Darkwood, he saved a young boy that was drowning in the waters of a river, young Patrick Wilding. He accompanied him on the place where his parents had been killed, he helped to bury them, and then became a sort of stepfather for the boy that one day would become Zagor.