In Alaska, the winters are long and dark, the land untamed. Tracy Petrikoff has always loved her family's remote home and her parents' business training and racing sled dogs: cold days out in the woods on a sled, warm nights inside by the fire, a family built of four hardworking humans and forty willing dogs. It seemed only a matter of time before Tracy's father won the Iditarod - and perhaps, not too long after, Tracy herself would win. But not everything is different. Tracy's mother was killed in a hit-and-run the year before, and the family is mired in grief and struggling to keep the business alive. Tracy holds tight to the rules her mother told her never to break: Never lose sight of the house. Never come home with dirty hands. Never make a person bleed... She tries not to think about the questions to which she will never have answers - questions about the natural instinct she inherited from her mother for working with dogs, questions about why her mother was walking by the side of the road the night she died. When a stranger attacks Tracy in the woods and knocks her unconscious, she does not tell her father. She does not want to give him another reason to worry - nor does she want him to keep her close to home. But shortly thereafter, another stranger emerges from the woods, looking for a job, and Tracy's omission becomes the first strand in a web drawing tightly over her family. Now the isolation Tracy has always valued in her home has begun to seem like a threat, and Tracy has to decide what she must do to protect those she loves best.