Archie Grey Owl is a trapper in Canada in the early 1930s when a young Iroquois woman from town asks him to teach her Indian ways. They live in the woods, where she is appalled at how trapped animals die. She adopts two orphaned beaver kits and helps Archie see his way to stop trapping. Instead, he works as a guide, a naturalist writer, and then the Canadian government hires him to save the beaver in a conserve by Lake Ajawaan in Prince Albert National Park. He writes a biography, which brings him attention in Canada and invitations to lecture in England. Before he leaves, he and Anahareo (Pony) marry. In England, his secret is revealed. Will Anahareo continue to love him?

The L-Shaped Room follows a young French girl, Jane (Leslie Caron), who arrives alone at a boarding house in Fulham, London. Beautiful and withdrawn, she encounters the residents of her house through the meandering first act of the film, each a social outsider in their own way.
Jane is pregnant, we learn, and has no desire to marry the father. On her first visit to a doctor, she wants to find out if she really is pregnant and consider her options. The doctor's facile assumption that she must want either marriage or an abortion so insults her that she determines to have the child.