In his remote Big Sur ranch house, Daniel Tallweather wakes to a disturbing SOS - cries in some half-remembered language and a terrible gnashing, like the sound of dogs tearing at a kill. Sounds that have shattered his sleep before. Sounds that his brother-in-law Vernon Callis knows, too. But the last member of the clan that took this chunk of California from the Indians 250 years ago isn't going to explain. Before night falls, Tallweather finds him dead, an implausible suicide. The ranch goes to Tallweather, along with the burden of defending it. Wouldn't this rugged, canyon-riven landscape dam up into a nice lake? Some drought-stricken locals seem to think so. Meanwhile the local newspaper serializes old mission records detailing a massacre of the Indians who once inhabited Callis Ranch. Is Tallweather, a descendant of those people, exacting a late revenge? With more unlikely deaths up in the hills, they wonder if everyone wouldn't be better off with Tallweather on death row and his land under 300 feet of water. In a race to uncover the past before the present overtakes him, Tallweather becomes both hunter and hunted.