Wildlife consultant Whip Sawtell begins a contract job with the University of Arizona monitoring a series of trail cameras in remote mountain ranges in southern Arizona and New Mexico. He is hoping to capture images of rare species: wolf, jaguar, ocelot or jaguarundi; but also bobcat, mountain lion, and bear. His project is going well until one night, he sees an animal he cannot identify. Right after that, automatic weapons fire rains down on his location from across the Mexican border.

Unbeknownst to Sawtell, two environmental rogues hijacked a flatbed truck carrying a jaguar trapped near Coba, Mexico and inadvertently released the animal just south of the US border. The jaguar follows a ridge in the Sierra Madre Mountains north toward the international border where Sawtell is working. When wildlife biologist Cat Bonner temporarily takes over his project she sees a young jaguar get captured in a live-trap. When two men on an all-terrain vehicle arrive to check the trap they spot Cat and open fire. ​Cat shoots back and suddenly her life becomes very complicated. 

Cat and her guide find two Wyoming pickups that were driven by the men Cat got in a firefight with. She finds a canvas sack of very rich copper ore in the back of one of the pickups. Later, Sawtell finds an illegal copper mine and road in Baker Canyon Wilderness. Sawtell ends up settling an old score with his nemesis, Randall Crossman, back in Wyoming