Content Warning: The novel and this guide refer to deadly acts of violence and attempted death by suicide.

The beginning of the novel features a young, unnamed couple fleeing Puritan oppression in the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the 1600s. The man is a dreamer who has made friends with the local Indigenous people and has a special connection to nature. The woman was betrothed to an abusive minister whom she didn’t love. She learns much nature lore from her companion as the two make a life for themselves in the wilds of western Massachusetts.

After the man dies, the woman marries an Indigenous man. He too dies, but she continues her life in the wilderness cabin she built with her first spouse. Years later, as an elderly woman, she takes in an abducted girl and her baby. When a party of English scouts threatens to massacre her Indigenous friends, the old woman feeds them poison mushrooms and kills them with an axe before being shot herself. Her spirit remains in the area, and her story is the first of many on the property that start in an idyllic fashion but end in tragedy, at least in the realm of the living.