The novel takes place in a distant northern village. The loser shaman Grisha Geonka lives there, who honors the customs of antiquity and firmly believes in the ancient legend about the land of demons, into which one of his ancestors once ended up. And everything would have been fine if a series of events involving the loss and discovery of a tambourine had not brought him and his friend Fedor face to face with the young fisherman Sergei, who managed to catch an unprecedented fish in an impassable swamp. While fishing, they find themselves in the distant past, at the very time when dinosaurs were the rulers of the earth. There they had to win food and housing from the local owners, as a result of which they found a headache in the form of a combat robot - an alien who would later free the rest of his army from the burial ground. A little later, they will encounter a new problem - a war between intelligent bees - Arches and ants - Terrans, in the epicenter of which they will find themselves.