The story of a little girl who has known nothing but nature from birth. Bears taught her to eat, birds to speak, foxes to play; she is unabashedly, irrefutably, irrespressibly Wild. That is, until one day she meets a new animal that looks oddly like her...

After her mother dies, Nell, a young woman who was raised in the backwoods of North Carolina, has never had contact with the outside world, and speaks a made up language, is taken in by Dr. Jerry Lovell and a psychologist who study her behavior and pattern of speech, while a judge decides her future.