Seeking a place to restore his soul, Simon Steele arrives on Slate Creek, in the Whitecloud Mountains of Idaho Territory in 1873. As he battles with his personal demons, personified by a savage wolverine that torments him, he is befriended by two people, one white and one Indian. Pining for the only woman he ever loved, time and time again he reads her letter of rejection, always seeing what he wants and not what she has written. When he is terribly wounded and near death from a final battle with the wolverine, his father's words come to mind: "the pain of the flesh is trivial compared to that of the soul." He begins his journey back home when the friend he thought he'd lost forever appears one day, and wants to return as well.