In “Prudence,” natural-born storyteller David Treuer spins a vivid, sorrowful tale set in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s at a lakeside resort and in a nearby reservation town in northern Minnesota.

Every summer, Emma Wash­burn leaves her elegant Chicago home to run the rustic resort she loves, the Pines. She’s visited occasionally (and reluctantly) by her philandering husband. Their introspective son, Frankie, flourishes at the Pines, happy to learn carpentry and wilderness skills from Felix, the Ojibwe caretaker, and to hang out with his friend Billy, who is also Ojibwe.

In August 1942, Frankie returns from college out East to visit his family before heading for Air Force training and World War II. Hours after his arrival, he, Billy and other young men join a boozy search for a German POW who has escaped from a prison camp across the lake from the Pines.

A dark adventure follows. Frankie and Billy are seen kissing in the woods by other searchers. Their embarrassment results in clumsy, dangerous bravado that explodes when one of them shoots at something moving in the brush, certain it is the POW.