Cloyd Attcity has never met his father, Leeno, a Navajo. For years, Cloyd searched for the man; finally, he runs away from his Ute group home and travels to Window Rock, Arizona, where all Navajo records are kept. Leeno is at a hospital there.

Cloyd buys flowers and pretends he’s a delivery agent with orders to give the flowers only to Leeno. Before the nurse can stop him, he enters his father’s room and finds a body with tubes attached. The nurse tells him Leeno is “brain dead” from a car crash four years earlier. Though terrified at the sight, Cloyd covers his feelings and walks out.

Cloyd hates school in Durango, Colorado, and gets into trouble at his group home. He dreams of visiting his grandmother back in White Mesa, Utah. She lets him disappear into the canyons or hitchhike all over. His housemother, Susan James, says Cloyd can’t visit her because she’s too lenient. Instead, he must spend the summer with a rancher friend of hers, Walter Landis.

They drive east from Durango and up a pine-forest canyon where the Landis ranch lies with its orchard, fields, barn, sheds, and house.