Set in Swaziland, it explores the landscape of childhood on two levels - at the surface, the life of a young white child and her brother in an English colonial environment and, beneath, the current of traditional African values, change and upheaval. The story is told also from the perspective of the mature woman, child no longer, who returns to the Swaziland of her youth to make her peace with what actually happened during her two childhood years at Ezulwini. With her group she follows the tracks of a female leopard, successor to the leopard that played its own part in the sequence of events and whose amoral presence overshadows this strangely beautiful tale.