Still grieving over their stillborn child, middle-aged couple Mabel and Jack left a comfortable Pennsylvania life in 1918 to homestead in Alaska. Two years later, after building a snowchild, they see glimpses of a young girl who appears to live in the woods. This girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods; she hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness.