With shades of his earlier thriller Deadly Pursuit, Berenger is cast as a backwoodsman known as the best tracker in the country and sent out, with his trusty hound, to hunt escaped convicts in a Montana wilderness, catching up with them only after they've been wiped out by what he comes to believe is a tribe of Cheyenne dog soldiers.
And so, with anthropologist Barbara Hershey in tow, he returns to find the lost tribe.The bulk of the film revolves around the concept of the modern cowboy who falls in with primitive survivalists, learns to respect them even if they have been killing back-packers for years, and finally turns into a Rambo-style hero to protect his "dogmen" buddies from a civilisation represented by a nasty sheriff (the always mean-spirited Smith).
It's painfully earnest about Native Americans (but old-fashioned enough to call them "Injuns") and ridiculously idealistic about their lifestyle. And director Murphy's script makes much of Cheyenne knowledge of herbal medicine but has Berenger return to civilisation to get penicillin for a brave whose wound has gone septic. Hershey ends up as recipient of all the clunker lines with Berenger mainly left to concentrate on not falling off his horse.