Jean de Mer is an Acadian Ranger - an unofficial seigneur of lands around Minas Basin. After three years' absence he returns to find his son Marc in trouble with a French partisan leader known as the Black Abbé. Taken captive, Marc is to be tried as a spy. Father and son make a quick escape and plan to expose the treacherous priest. When Marc is wounded, Jean sets out on a perilous canoe journey with a young English woman to rescue her child from the Black Abbé. Set in the years leading up to the 1755 expulsion of the Acadians.