The story begins as a woman named Sara looks upon her payload as she is taking a carriage ride across the Finnish countryside to where her six-year-old daughter Katri has been residing with her grandparents. A cowpoke's cautionary challenge becomes the forum by which Sara explains that she has had to work abroad for protracted periods of time as evidenced by her previous visit having taken place the year before -- a dynamic that has driven Katri to perch on a bridge railing oblivious to how worried her grandparents Hilda and Julius Ukonniemi are about her. A very sentimental mother-daughter reunion gives way to Katri exchanging notes with Sara about the lives they have led before Sara presents Katri her payload -- an energetic dachshund puppy. Katri becomes extremely fond of the dachshund puppy which she names Aapeli whose immense affection and situational utility does very little to compensate for Sara's protracted absence during which the Colossal War in Europe extinguishes all correspondence and finding to her horror that her grandparents' micro-economy is in a bad way even without a large bear that thinks of Katri and her grandparents as food before Aapeli barks some trepidation into the large ursine. Even as the male villagers slay the bear that they think is why another farm lost two cows and Aapeli barks an injunction against proximity to the forest to the calf, it ultimately offers very cold comfort to Katri who does not like the necessity of selling a cow that she is fond of -- and that a bear has decided for the cow being its next meal along with her grandpa.