In the summer of 1953, Canadian bush pilot Charlie Halliday, a brash, former Second World War bomber pilot based in Yellowknife, is flying a routine job in the Queen Maud Gulf on the Arctic Ocean when he encounters a small band of Inuit people who plead for his help. They are traveling with a sick young woman, Kanaalaq, and they ask Charlie to fly her to a hospital. Charlie suspects she has tuberculosis. At first he refuses, but when they offer him two valuable walrus tusks for his help, he reluctantly agrees to take her to Yellowknife.