Wolf Tamer is the story of a father's love for his son (and a son's faith in his father) and of the meeting of two cultures, American and Ojibway, on the Michigan frontier.

In 1823 Caleb Jordan journeys to the Michigan Territory from Albany, New York, where his widowed father, Daniel, has accepted a job blacksmithing at a newly established Ojibway reservation near Saginaw Bay. Separated from Daniel in a spring blizzard, Caleb finds an abandoned wolf puppy and is taken in by an Ojibway family fleeing the encroachment of American settlers on their hunting territories.

Caleb quickly bonds with Morning Star, an Ojibway girl of his age, as they care for the growing wolf puppy. The yellow fever epidemic which the year before took Caleb's mother also claimed his sister; and Morning Star too has recently lost a sibling-her brother, Fleeting Elk, who died from an unnamed disease brought into the Michigan Country by American settlers. Caleb is anxious over his father's fate, but comforted with the memory of his father's promise that, were they ever separated, Daniel Jordan would always find him.

Daniel, after recovering from an attack by the same wolf-bounty hunters who killed the wolf puppy's mother, embarks on a many faceted odyssey to find his son. This odyssey takes him deep into the world of the Great Lakes frontier, with its American military outposts, French Canadian fur traders, Ojibway summer villages and winter hunting camps.

Caleb is adopted into the Ojibway tribe and spends the summer in Morning Star's clan's summer village, learning the lifeways of the Ojibway people. After traveling by canoe, on foot and horseback, and suffering malaria and hypothermia, Daniel Jordan is finally reunited with his son at the winter hunting camp of Morning Star's family.