After being shot on the banks of a rural lake in Camas Swale, Tom replaces his heart with a cold stone and sets out through nine miles of woods to reach his home before he bleeds out. Accompanied by a feral pig, Tom and his companion traverse deep into the terrifying dream of the swale, encountering his loved ones as tormented, puppeted wood folk, and their creator, Eat, an abstraction of the woods and cruel judge of Tom's past. Through the woods, the col, the valley, and an abandoned suburbia, Tom and the pig are haunted by these distorted forces of the swale and the past. At times reverted to his youthful self and at times taken over by the whims of Eat, Tom discovers that finally arriving home may not be the end of wood folk, or the wilderness, and that the coldest sheer of this nightmare has only begun churning to life.