The principal characters are Joe Two Trees, whose life story makes up most of this book, and the twelve-year-old senior Theodore Kazimiroff, the young white boy whom Two Trees befriends.

Joe Two Trees is the last remaining member of the Weckquaesgek band of the Algonquin people. He grows up in an ever-shrinking band made up of the surviving members of the small part of the Turtle clan that decided to stay in the Hunter Island area when the majority moved away to escape the increasing pressures of white settlement. He is a hard-working, reverent, elderly man who tries to live in "the Indian way" as he was taught to do by his parents.

Several years of trying to live in white society soon after his mother died—leaving him alone in the world—have convinced him that he is the last Indian...