The visionary adventure begins on the Savannah in Eastern Africa, c. 1962. We meet a baboon family. (Baboons are the only existing animal culture to witness the untimely end of past civilizations).
Next, we meet a human family; husband and wife scientists with a young son, who are in Africa to save the baboons from extinction by relocating them.
Although the couple is in Africa to prevent annihilation, Alex, the husband, while he journeys across the Savannah for many weeks with the baboons, finds his connection with history while he communicates in his unique tongue with the baboon tribe.
A CIA agent, McClay, is hunting for Alex because McClay has discovered that Alex is writing a book titled Animal Warfare. McClay has convinced the US government that Alex is training animals for warfare against the USA.
The baboons journey across Africa hundreds of miles to escape death by the farmer vigilantes. After being ambushed at a farmhouse, they take Alex-who had been accidentally shot and is unconscious - with them to save his life. The tribe, enlarging as it travels, to four hundred or more, reaches their Eden, the Mountains of the Moon, but their troubles aren't over.
Alex and Sara's son Jesse, who has contracted a life-threatening disease, is airlifted to a hospital.
From then on, the pace is picked up when a shooting, a murder and an unsolved mystery enters the story.