Bounty hunter Lewis Gates (Tom Berenger) finds the corpses of three escaped convicts in the wilderness, apparently shot by primitive arrows. Gates and anthropologist Lillian Sloane (Barbara Hershey) follow clues through the mountains to discover a tribe of Cheyenne Indians that has lived in hiding for a century. After the twisted Sheriff Deegan (Kurtwood Smith) uses the violence as grounds for retaliation, Gates must fight to save the Cheyenne from genocide at the hands of a vicious posse.