When Charlie's friend Singing Bird, a Teton Sioux, tells him that ravens have curing powers, Charlie steals a baby bird from its nest hoping it will cure his grandfather, and Granddad, a retired naturalist, encourages Charlie to record his observations of the bird and study the effect it has on humans.

Based on the extraordinary life of Louis Erdrich's grandfather Patrick Gourneau, who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, with lightness and gravity, and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a literary master. Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel-bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation...