Three days before the season opening, Native Alaskan commercial salmon fisherman, Johnny Ingman leaves his hometown of Sweetwater bound for the fishing grounds and disappears.

Johnny's disappearance comes at a time of deep frustration in Johnny's tiny home village. Changing pressures, values, and demands from the outside world are increasingly disrupting insular, secretive, and self-reliant Alaskan communities like Sweetwater, undermining their traditional cultures, and threatening the vulnerable salmon troll fishery that is their economic base.

The relentless investigation by Johnny's close friend, Alaska Wildlife Trooper Chuck Kolinsky, highlights these forces and ignites an acrimonious public confrontation between him and an crowd of angry fishers at a fish buying scow in a cove on the fishing grounds. And it sparks new insights which allow Kolinsky to identify the killer.