Twelve-year-old Ryan Morrison is social kryptonite. He's much too short and way too intelligent for any kid in his eighth grade to want him for a friend, and his freakishly small size attracts every bully in school. Unable to forge a healthy relationship with his troubled father who scoffs at Ryan's dream of becoming a famous paleontologist who discovers an unknown species of dinosaur, Ryan feels miserably detached from school and family. Until, that is, the day Ryan unearths a seven-foot silver canister from a river bank and hides it in his bedroom. Of alien technology and design, it opens to reveal a perfectly preserved "fossil"-a 34,000 year-old Ice Age caveman. Incredibly, Bahntouka is very much alive. With Ryan's help, he adjusts to modern life with curiosity and surprising intelligence. His gift for insight and gentle wisdom helps Ryan's dysfunctional family begin to bond and heal, even as Bahntouka desperately yearns for his lost wife and baby, entombed in another silver canister somewhere in Oregon or Washington. But when the corrupt Marion County Sheriff and his drug-running accomplices threaten his new family in an escalating life-and-death struggle, Bahntouka reacts with extraordinary courage and sacrifice to rescue them, unleashing man-sized courage in the boy everybody calls Small Fry.