Meet Lute Bapcat, orphan, loner, former cowboy, Rough Rider, beaver trapper, a man who in 1913, with the enthusiastic recommendation by Theodore Roosevelt, himself, becomes one of the Michigan's first civil service game wardens. His territory: The Keweenaw Peninsula, the state's industrial center. Red Jacket asks Lute to confront an explosive, bloody labor strike; a siege-like sabotage, including a sudden rash of decapitated, spoiled deer; poisoned trout streams and well water; and unusual deforestation--all apparently designed by mine owners to deny nature's bounty to the strikers, and thereby to break the union.