It all begins when Rocky follows Mick Strum around town while he sketches its people, animals and graveyard. Mick has been commissioned by Rocky's Kansas town to create a memorial to their war dead.
As Rocky learns to respect Mick and his talents, he helps her to develop her own artistic sensibilities.
But the townspeople see things in Mick's drawings that they don't want to know or accept about themselves. Can Mick help them accept one monument...

Fourteen-year-old John comes of age and gains self-reliance during the summer he spends up in the Wyoming mountains tending his father's herd of sheep.

Fifteen-year-old Wil discovers himself and the wonders of nature when he leaves home to live on an island in northern Wisconsin.