As an angry thirteen-year-old in 1930, Oscar Wolf, a Native from the Chippewas of Rama Indian Reserve, sets a fire that inadvertently kills his grandfather and a young maid. Haunted by guilt and fear of retribution, he sets out on a lifelong quest for redemption. Through a series of adventures and occupations, he discovers that peace of mind in the middle of the twentieth-century is a difficult thing to find.