In 1866 two young women are captured in the Wyoming Territory by a band of Lakota. Sarah, originally from Virginia, and Elizabeth, from rural New York but at home in the west, travel with the Indians for a year. In these extraordinary circumstances, they forge a powerful bond. This is tested when Sarah, the story's narrator, embraces life with the Indians, while Elizabeth holds to her faith that she'll be released from her 'heathen' captors and returned to her husband and young sons.

A hostage exchange brokered by Gen. Armstrong Custer turns violent and Sarah is injured while trying to escape her rescuers. The two women have very different experiences of their return to white culture.

Far Cry is a story of many kinds of love set against the persistent cruelty of Manifest Destiny in the west and the undiminished viciousness of racial hatred in the south at the end of the Civil War. Sarah must decide how to live honourably in an America that is evolving through violence.