An adolescent boy, George Treadlaw, is picked out of his people to guide a strange wealthy man, named Phillips, to a mulberry boy who has escaped. Mulberry boys are children, picked out by Phillips at the age just before puberty. To be chosen as a mulberry boy is something sacred and revered, and so although the people know the unfortunate fate of mulberry boys, their sacrifice is respected and they allow their children to be taken from them by the wealthy man in a suit. When Phillips takes these children, he performs surgery on them, sterilizing them and pausing their growth, and preparing their digestive system. These genderless child sacrifices are then placed in small boxes with limited light and vision, and are fed strictly a diet of mulberry leaves in order to produce a silk that is harvested through surgery into their intestines. The mulberry boys become developmentally stunted and are viewed as something subhuman, reduced to a sacrificial cash crop. George is chosen to guide Phillips into the woods after John Barn, a mulberry boy, escapes from his box, where the Mothers, the women in the society, take care of the mulberry boys, who are frightened by men. George prefers the traditional, ancestral ways of his people and is very in tune with the land. Reading the land like a book, he leads Phillips to John Barn, who has climbed up a tree to escape the man, leaving a trail of half-digested thrown up food along the way. His digestive tract has become accustomed to solely mulberries, and the food he has apparently eaten may kill him by obstructing his feeble intestines. Phillips performs surgery on the mulberry boy in the woods, with no pain medication or anesthetic. As John Barn struggles under George, who Phillips has ordered to lay atop the mulberry boy, Phillips slices open his abdomen and sorts through the intestines by hand to pick out digesting food from the silk of the intestines, the sole focus of his care. In the midst of his pain, George has a sudden revelation of empathy and begins to see John Barn as a person. He later asks Phillips if the surgery to create mulberry boys could be reversed, and the person brought back to a full state of being. Phillips has never considered this, and George begins questioning the entire foundation of his society, and the man who runs it. He decides to help free John Barn and end Phillips' harvesting of mulberry boys. The next morning, George awakes before Phillips and ties his hands together. He then drags him to the river, where he pushes him in and leaves him to drown. He returns to the camp and walks back to his village with John Barn. They discuss the pleasant weather as they walk back through the woods together, mulberry and boy, expecting a new life ahead of them with Phillips dead.