The novel opens with the narrator, 14-year-old Sound of Running Feet, as she travels on horseback to gather supplies for her tribe. She has several friends and cousins with her, and it is cold in the mountain passes, though it is spring. In a familiar meadow, Sound of Running Feet notices trees cut down and a cabin, which indicates the presences of white men. She and her caravan try to sneak past but Jason Upright and his wife, white settlers panning for gold in a stream, see them. Sound of Running Feet asks why they built on land they don’t own, and a troubled Native boy who went to a nearby mission school translates. Jason Upright challenges her, replying, “You Nez Perce own too much land. You can’t use all the land, not even half of it […] You are a greedy bunch” (4). Sound of Running Feet leaves on horseback but turns from a distance and shoots a hole in Jason Upright’s wife’s gold pan using her grandfather Old Joseph’s rifle. 

Sound of Running Feet returns home and tells her father about the cabin. It is a windy day, and