Two Yakutian fathers who lost their sons become locked in a tormenting cycle of revenge against a pristine snowy landscape.
Yakut Stepan Beresekov periodically falls into a lethargic sleep. Only a Russian, the son of a priest, Ivan Popov, can distinguish his condition from real death. But Popov is going on a long ethnographic expedition. Stepan decides to follow his savior so as not to be buried alive.
He is forty years old. He left his wife and children in order to care for his mother, who is under seventy. She has Alzheimer's disease. She begins to forget who she is, and ceases to recognize her son. The hero has one goal in life - by all means keep her mother’s memory of herself. He takes her from village to town to start a new life with her.
