Three days before the season opening, Native Alaskan commercial salmon fisherman, Johnny Ingman leaves his hometown of Sweetwater bound for the fishing grounds and disappears.

Johnny's disappearance comes at a time of deep frustration in Johnny's tiny home village. Changing pressures, values, and demands from the outside world are increasingly disrupting insular, secretive, and self-reliant Alaskan communities like Sweetwater, undermining their traditional cultures, and threatening the vulnerable salmon troll fishery that is their economic base.