Saul Barnard grew up in a family of woodcutters. The woodcutters are scared of the elephants in the forest, but there's one elephant that never seems to threaten Saul. Tired of being exploited by wood buyers, Saul takes a stand and his father chases him away. He goes to work on the wood buyer MacDonald's wood yard, where he gets to know MacDonald's daughter, Kate, and falls in love with her. After a few years (10 years in the film, 2 years in the book) he leaves MacDonald (and Kate) and joins the first prospectors in the forest, searching for gold. Millwood becomes a small town with hotels and bars and houses. Kate appears again. One night, an elephant makes trouble and MacDonald tells Saul's brother, Jozef, to find the elephant and kill it. Saul hears about this and sets off to find the elephant before Jozef. The film is based on the novel by Dalene Matthee, which was translated from Afrikaans to more than 10 other languages, although the film differs substantially from the book.