Seeking a place to restore his soul, Simon Steele arrives on Slate Creek, in the Whitecloud Mountains of Idaho Territory in 1873. As he battles with his personal demons, personified by a savage wolverine that torments him, he is befriended by two people, one white and one Indian. Pining for the only woman he ever loved, time and time again he reads her letter of rejection, always seeing what he wants and not what she has written. When he is terribly wounded and near death from a final battle with the wolverine, his father's words come to mind: "the pain of the flesh is trivial compared to that of the soul." He begins his journey back home when the friend he thought he'd lost forever appears one day, and wants to return as well.

Simon Steele and his friend, Buell Mace, leave home at nineteen, Simon because there's no reason to stay and Buell because there's every reason to run. At a roadhouse outside Fort Laramie, Wyoming Territory, where there are few rules and even fewer consequences if you break one, Simon finds work as the house's supply man and Buell as an enforcer. Hanging tenaciously to the morals of his parents, and to the memory of the woman who rejected him, Simon conflicts with the more pragmatic and volatile Buell and seeks advice and comfort from three people: an old prospector, a Shoshoni Indian, and a woman who cooks for the saloon. But it's not enough, and he succumbs to the climate of evil with an act of unprecedented violence.