Ahto Twickanen is a young man struggling to find his place in a world split between the traditions of his Sami/Finnish ancestors and the realities of modern America culture - a culture which too often, in his experience, discounts or ignores the ancestral wisdom of the old world. As Ahto grows toward maturity, confronted with family tragedy, physical altercations, self-doubt and torn loyalties, he is guided by the insights of the one person in whom he can trust and confide, his great uncle Jaakko - a small man with bright eyes and a checkered past, who mysteriously appears every year, at midnight, on Christmas Eve. But when a dejected and confused seventeen year-old Ahto needs him most, Jaakko fails to appear. Horrified by a vision of impending catastrophe, Ahto's life is transformed as he and his once-estranged father travel north to Canada's Yukon Territory in the midst of a chilling, bone-cracking winter quest to discover the fate of his missing great uncle. But Ahto's journey leads him into more than he could have ever imagined when he discovers that he is successor to an ancient family linage of noaide - shamans of the Sami people, and the inheritor of an instrument of immense power that has been passed down from master to apprentice since the last ice age.