When Larnie Moran finds her family's milk cow gone, she knows she's the one at fault. The Morans have to have that cow, for Larnie's sickly mother is about to have a child, and the infant will need milk.
Larnie can not-will not-ask her Papa to get Bessie back for her and risk being called a "skitterbrain" once again. Instead, she follows a large cattle herd across the empty prairie in search of the runaway cow-just in time to see it join a passing trail herd and lose itself among the thousands of steers.

Along the trail to Wichita, she runs into Buzzard, a tough boy younger than she but a lot stronger, who scornfully orders her to go home. Nearly made prisoner by a mad, lonely woman seeking her lost family, befriended by a sodbuster family and discovering that she will have to search through twenty thousand heads of beef steers for her lone cow, her journey is nothing but easy.

Follow this high-spirited young frontier heroine in a wild and wooly adventure rich in history and female courage.