The three-year-old son of Elias and Barta van Rooyen gets lost without a trace in the Knysna bush. In the Lange Kloof, on the other side of the mountain, Fiela Komoetie takes pity on a "throwaway lamb" that comes to cry at her door one night. One child is Luke, the other Benjamin. Is it the same child? This mystery is unravelled nine years later by two census men who find the white child with the blue eyes with a brown family in the Lange Kloof.