A precocious white cat named Puff skirmishes through a grassy field trailing a monarch butterfly to a brilliantly colored forest in rural Vermont. Danger peers behind a tree as Puff stumbles into a gallant deer named Jumper who explains the rules of the forest during a fast-paced race against time to a cave hidden behind a towering waterfall. Puff discovers a passageway behind the falls leading to an abandoned mine where a frightened bat causes him to step back and fall into a bottomless pit of dark shadows. Puff dangles in the depths from a thin crag while Jumper rushes to his rescue accidentally leaning into the unforgiving force of the falls, leaving Puff to find his own way home.
Puff lumbers lost and discouraged down the mountainside where he dodges a deadly swipe from a wily fox named Felix by darting up an adjacent tree. Felix glares a sinister stare upward while delivering a demoralizing speech Puff wields into a clever dialogue. But the conversation is cut short when Puff resolves he must either become Felix’s next meal-or take the impossible leap to freedom from the edge of a steep precipice to the base of the falls.
Two amusing twin brother otters witness Puff’s leap and save him from drowning, then secretly guide him downstream past a den of ravenous wolves observing from a distance. Puff separates from the brothers seeking shelter in a complex labyrinth of tunnels with a paranoid and nearly blind groundhog. The brothers meanwhile find Jumper injured downstream surrounded by wolves and commission help from a commanding yet compassionate black bear to save the deer culminating in a great battle.
Felix catches up to Puff farther uphill just as the cat is snatched away by a great horned owl named Obadiah. But the owl’s pledge to protect Puff dissolves when a hunter’s bullet punches through his left wing, leaving Puff to find his own way home. Felix confronts Puff one last time at an ancient tree bridge where a deadly rattlesnake resides. Caught between two evils, Puff retreats into the turbulent currents of a stream emptying into the most treacherous waterfall of all.
