Deanna Wolfe is not really what you might call a people person, and she has chosen a solitary job quite deliberately. She is working as a park ranger. Of course, there are other people around her but the more connection they try to force, the more reclusive Deanna becomes. She picked the area - a remote rambling mountainous area of Virginia - because of its isolated farming community that she had believed would, for the most part, keep to themselves. Her life putters on in a routine kind of way until one exceptionally hot summer when the overwhelming humidity seems to change the behaviors of those in the little community in which she lives. During this time, she is startled in her isolated wood cabin by a hunter named Eddie Bondo. He is young, and invades her space, both physically and mentally. She does not know how to respond to him, and at once her sense of self-assuredness vanishes, as well as the peace and solitude she has deliberately constructed for herself.
Further down the mountain things are taking a strange turn too. Lusa Maluf Landowski is a city girl who keeps to herself, largely because she is aloof and does not know how to communicate with those who have come from a different environment. Lusa married a farmer and the role of farmer's wife is still quite challenging for her, but she has quickly grown to love the wildness of the land itself, and finds herself in a situation where her hand is forced. If she does not admit to herself how much she loves it, she will find it slipping through her fingers before she can do anything about it.
There is trouble a few farms down as well; two elderly neighbors, both set in their ways and growing ever more cantankerous as they get older, are in the throes of an escalating feud that started out as a small disagreement but with every humid day that passes gets more and more heated itself. They fight about the existence of God, the impact of technology that they don't like, don't want and don't understand, and the use of pesticides that are changing the way that they farm entirely.
As the summer continues, the residents who have all lived gloriously disparate and unconnected lives begin to interact, thrown together by the changes that the weather brings to their environment. They begin to find out that they do have something to do with each other after all, and they start to learn from nature, and understand that far from nature existing to provide them with a living, they are bound to the earth in a way that they never understood before. They want to keep their land, their farms and their beautiful surroundings, and so they set about woking together in order to do so.
