After a year of studying at the Suvorov School, 13-year-old Vovka Kulikov returns to his native Siberian village. The boy learns that his father, the chairman of the collective farm, has gone to the front, and meanwhile problems are falling on the village: a gang of mysterious robbers is terrorizing local residents and endangering the timely harvest. Vovka decides to stand up for his family and friends and confronts the bandits.

Three brothers come to the parental home to visit their old mother, who is dying. In the oven, they find a charred document on the adoption of a boy, on which the name and year of birth of the child cannot be read. Now, based on scraps of childhood memories, you need to reconstruct the events and figure out who is the adopted son.