Fourteen-year-old Jay Berry Lee, the story’s protagonist, lives on a farm in the Oklahoma Ozarks in the late 1800s. The people in Jay Berry’s life are his immediate family members (Mama, Papa, and twin sister Daisy) and his grandparents. Jay Berry is especially close to his grandfather, who runs a general store and often make trades and deals with the Native people who live in the surrounding regions. Jay Berry has a bluetick hound named Rowdy with whom he is very close as well.

The novel is told in Jay Berry’s first-person point of view; he opens the narrative as an adult telling a story about a summer in his youth. He introduces the idea that he experienced a happy and contented boyhood but that the monkeys he encountered that summer “all but drove [him] out of [his] mind” (1). This bit of hyperbole announces the novel’s conflict immediately and offers an early taste of Jay Berry’s storytelling style. As Jay Berry’s story continues, readers piece together indirect details about Jay Berry: He loves his family and has a sincere respect for his hardworking parents.