Brandon deWilde had previously worked with Walter Brennan in 1956's Good-bye, My Lady and with Brian Keith in the 3-part The Tenderfoot for Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color in 1964.

Cam Calloway, a fur trapper of Irish extraction raised by the Micmac Indians, lives on timber land near the backwoods town of Swiftwater, Vermont in the 1920s with his wife Liddy, his 16-year-old son Bucky, his hound Sounder, a black bear cub called Keg, and a pet crow, Scissorbill.

Regarded as an eccentric by residents of the town for his lifestyle as a woodsman, Cam's lifelong dream is to establish a sanctuary for the great flocks of wild geese that fly over Swiftwater during their migrations.

Cam has his sights on making $1100 to buy 30 acres of marshland surrounding Swiftwater Lake, where he will plant a patch of corn to lure the geese into his proposed sanctuary.

The final mortgage payment on Cam's own property is also coming due, so with winter approaching he and Bucky seek a virgin area to set out two traplines, hoping for a lucrative season in fox and ermine that will finance Liddy's dreams for a nice home as well as his own.

They scout the rough Jackpine Valley, an area never trapped before because it is unknown to the local whites and feared as a place of bad spirits by the Micmacs.