Thus Billy Singer must seek the shape-shifting telepathic creature only known as Cat, whom he had caught and trapped for a museum.

However, Billy has been growing increasingly fatalistic in the time leading up to the story, and originally offers to let Cat kill him with no struggle.

Billy does so, but remains fatalistic, with Cat reading in his mind a wish to die and his foreknowledge of a final location.

The dedication page reads "To Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee", two Navajo Tribal Police characters in detective stories by Tony Hillerman.

The creature "Cat" is referred to as a Torglind Metamorph, last of its kind from a planet long since destroyed when its star went nova.