Alma-Ata Film Studio

Grisha secretly leaves for the virgin lands without his mother’s permission. The young man quickly adapts to the new hardships and soon, despite his age, becomes one of the leaders of the brigade. Grisha’s mother, Pelageya Maksimovna, arrives at the virgin-land state farm to take her son home, but she ends up staying there and, with motherly love, cooks food for the young pioneers of the virgin lands, who become as dear to her as her own son.

Near the city of Verny, surrounded by Cossack patrols, the paths of three friends diverge. Instead of his native aul, Nartai finds only ruins. The death of his mother, the disappearance of his fiancée, and the oppression from the stanitsa ataman — all this forces Nartai to join the revolutionary struggle. Hunger and poverty, and pleas for bread greet the blacksmith Azim in his native Zhetysu. A Cossack horse kills Azim’s little son with a kick of its hoof when the boy reaches for scattered grains of bread. Grief turns the blacksmith into the leader of a starving, rebellious crowd. The fate of the third soldier is not easy either. Pavel Zernov, pausing only briefly at the bedside of his dying little son, hastens to rejoin his comrades who have gone underground.

At the collective farm’s animal-breeding station, the young naturalists lose a fox named Serebryanka, which has run away. The children ask an old hunter, Mukhtar-aga, to catch the fox with the help of a golden eagle. The hunter agrees. In the duel with the fox, however, the eagle is defeated. Mukhtar-aga is distressed: the bird is no longer fit for hunting. Then the children decide to catch a young eaglet and give it to Mukhtar-aga. Khasen and Sasha set off for the mountains…