1930: Salter's Creek, former trading post, an isolated settlement in NW Canada, long-fallen into decline after rumours of a gold strike turned out to be false, serves scattered outlying homesteads hacked out of the surrounding forest by immigrant Scottish families dispossessed of their Highland birth-right by the Clearances.

It is necessary to decide who should be responsible for the welfare of Kip Harrison, orphaned aged eight by a car accident and adopted by his elderly great aunt who dies shortly before his eleventh birthday. Should his guardian be the austere Minister and his wife, or the amiable schoolmaster whom Kip himself prefers?

Nobody except the reader is aware of the boy's accidental encounter with the fanatical old itinerant preacher 'Pope' Potter with which the story opens and which is to have such far-reaching consequences.

In an exceptionally dry summer, the threat of forest fires in everyone's mind, a worrying pattern of small conflagrations and the bizarre desecration of the church increases tension as The Great Blaze eats its way towards Salter's Creek.