The story of the Wellsleys, an aristocratic family unable to save their ancestral estate because of debts. As they struggle to find a solution, a series of disturbing apparitions begin to haunt them, forcing the Wellsleys to confront the deep injustices they and other landowners, past and present, have wrought.

A young boy witnesses his parents' murder. Later, as he grows up, he befriends a bear in the wilderness and the chief of a local Indian tribe, and he stays with the Indians, but makes an enemy of the chief's son. As he enters adulthood he sets out to find the men responsible for his parents' deaths.