1919 The civil war crossed the Ural ridge and doused the Siberian expanses with a bloody tide. The native Chaldon Stepan Zykov led a detachment of partisans and recaptured the district town from the Kolchakites, helped the Bolsheviks who had rebelled and... was shot by the Red Army soldiers along with his wife on the threshold of his own house... The Siberian taiga is great and generous, its riches are inexhaustible - honey, furs, nuts. And people living in the taiga are open-minded and free-spirited in body and soul. And every spring, from large and small settlements, old and small - vagabonds - go into the taiga to hunt in the hope of finding their luck. So somehow the former politician Andrei, the old fisherman Lekhman, and two inseparable friends - Antokha and Vanka-Svistoplyas - came together around the same fire...