Beyond Recall

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He thought he might have to kill her.

She came up the gradual slope of grit and scree. Because there were thorn bushes and tufts of yellowed grass, her livestock went ahead of her, shepherded by two dogs that alternately walked close to her heel and charged to head off attempts by the more independent goats to break from the group. The thought of taking her down distressed him.

He would have been described, he reckoned, as a kindly boy: twenty-six years and four months old, with no history of vindictiveness, cruelty, or violence that could be called gratuitous, that had found its way on to his personnel file. Enjoyed his work and considered good at it by his superiors. He was used to making fast judgements on what confronted him. He lay cramped in the hide that he had fashioned in the night’s darkness, a few stars to give him enough light to burrow under the lip of earth and stones. He had used the excavated earth to build a shallow parapet and was protected by camouflaged scrim netting that would – hopefully – prevent light reflecting off the lenses of the optics he had brought with him. The problem that faced him was that the goats and the dogs seemed intent on moving in a straight line that ended at his hide. If they kept going, the four dozen goats and the two dogs and the one girl would meander or stamp right over him. The goats would scatter, the dogs would set up a chorus of hysterical barking, she would scream, and the cavalry – hers, not his – would come.

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