The 1930s, the times of Stalinist repressions. A young man sentenced to 25 years for love of his homeland escapes from the stage echelon of the NKVD, which transports exhausted and desperate people to a slow death in the Gulag camps. A townsman, an aircraft design engineer, finds himself in a forest thicket teeming with predators, without a map, weapons, tools, warm clothes or even food.