Aina Lappi moves from Finland to Canada to join her young suitor Uwe Pahakka, who years ago left to buy land. Her parents are suspicious of the boy’s prospects, but he sends the title to his farm and money for Aina’s passage, and she leaves with dreams of the vast new lands of Canada and a rosy recollection of her childhood love for Uwe. Upon arriving, however, she finds the farm and its shack dismal and uninviting, and Uwe not nearly as charming or as personable as she’d expected. The two spend their days huddling in winter cold in silence, and Aina is only buoyed at Uwe’s promise to buy her a heifer to keep her company. But when the time comes to bring the cow to their farm, the owner says she will refuse to cross the ice between the two properties. Undeterred, Aina fashions leather boots with spikes embedded for the cow to wear and grip as she crosses. Uwe begs her not to try and put shoes on a cow in front of the neighbors, crying that it will make him the embarrassment of the town, but she drags him along anyway. Her fix succeeds, to everyone’s surprise, and she is lauded for her creativity.

Olga does indeed provide companionship to Aina, but despite her apparent happiness, at night she stews over methods of killing her husband. Around the same time she becomes pregnant, Uwe determines that his farmland cannot be cleared and he’ll have to leave to earn money by prospecting instead. While he’s gone, a wildfire ravages their home, temporarily blinding Aina and wounding Olga so badly that Aina shoots her out of compassion. When Uwe returns to see if she needs help, she shoots him too. She buries both of them deeply, births her child soon after, and books passage for the two back to Finland the following spring (her husband having regrettably disappeared). Upon returning, she remarries and tends to a dairy farm rife with heifers.