Henry Fielder, solitary and unmoored in his thirties, runs into an old lover and finds himself ready to tell the story he has harbored for two decades.

He is fifteen, in rural western Oregon, enduring a year of sorrows: his mother has died, his father is physically abusive, and his extraordinary spiritual affinity for the wild lives of his native country seems to desert him. The abuse escalates, and ultimately a natural disaster catalyzes a crisis in which father and son betray each other and Henry sets out on a...