Mitji has lived with an Aboriginal tribe for as long as she can remember As a child she learned the skills of survival in the desert but now as she comes to womanhood, her white skin and red hair make her feel an outcast She runs away, resolved to try and find her own kind and beg them to let her live with them But the first of the Walypala, the 'white people', she finds is dead and the next dying - fate takes a hand in her surprising story