The year is 1900 and young mother Annaliese Stregal is forced by her husband, John, to leave their comfortable life in Louisville, Kentucky to live in a lumber camp in the north Georgia mountains where he has launched a timber business with his brother. Joining her there with even more outrage and dismay is the prickly sister-in-law she loathes, Lucenia, who is full of opinions about every women's issue of the day - social justice for the oppressed, equal rights, birth control, the morality of female sexual pleasure - and possessing not one domestic skill. To protect their children and battle the mountain enemies they have in common, the women strike a fragile truce, but a new national controversy is gaining steam: the annihilation of America's forests, and this one Annaliese cannot ignore. The brothers pick up their pace in scraping their fortune off the pristine hillsides just as John begins to unravel, putting the families' future in jeopardy. Unlikely help comes from a pair of Cherokee Indian brothers, but it is Annaliese who must act decisively to save John from the grisly reckoning he foresaw all along and save the mountains from him.