The letter reached him in Cape Town. A casual acquaintance begged him for help. She wrote that her husband had died, the workers were fleeing the plantation, and those who remained were keeping her in a cage. It sounded monstrous! He gathered a small detachment and set off. The only thing he was able to figure out before this was that she was believed to be a kei gaibu - possessed by the spirit of a leopard. Gene Wolfe says: There were two godmothers in this story, if you will. The first is that I obviously love William B. Seabrook's The White Werewolf of Saraban in a Cage, one of those wonderful stories that we have completely forgotten; I wanted to draw attention to him. There are sins and there are sins. When I'm gone, I don't want my accuser to say, "My Lord, Gene found this wonderful story starving in the cellar, climbed up and forgot about it." Secondly, because it is a story that makes the reader ask: "What happens next? Can a civilized man, alone on a plantation in Africa, imprison a woman for life and get away with it? Of course not! If he doesn't kills, she will sooner or later be released - and probably sooner rather than later."