He goes out at half past six. The gate creaks. He whistles two notes and the animals answer on the second.

Sixty-one head. He counts them because they get counted. He counts them going out and he counts them coming back, and in six years he has not lost one, and that is why they took him on.

He ties his laces above the ankle, not below, because in tall grass the ones below come undone. In his bag he has a plastic bottle cut in half, which serves him as a scoop for water, and every evening he carries it home and sets it to dry on the low wall, upside down.

The grazing is behind the village, down the slope, where the water stays. First you go slow, because the animals eat as they walk. First you keep the flock tight on the track. First you look at the road, which is far off and white, and almost nobody passes.

The pen is wire mesh on a tube frame, with the green paint gone in three places, and the wire that holds the gate he twisted himself, three turns, six years ago.

Coming back, at five, the gate creaks from the other side and the creak is the same. Then you close the wire again. Then you count another time. Then you go home by the low track, which is ten minutes longer but does not pass in front of the houses.

That Thursday the truck comes in the early afternoon. It has a grey tarpaulin and a wooden ramp lashed to its side.

They do not hurry. They untie the ramp, set it down, test it with a foot. One stays up top, two below.

They load the way loading is done. They take the goats by the back leg and pass them up, and the one up top pulls them in by the neck, and the sheet metal of the bed makes a drum sound every time.

Then the shoulder. One of the three holds the gate still with his shoulder, because the gate, once open, swings back on its own.

Ontiretse comes up from below and sees them and does not shout. He says good evening.

One of them has a spade. He holds it halfway down the handle and uses it to push the animals up the ramp, flat, against their flanks.

Then he raises it.

The blow lands flat on the shoulder and not on the head. From the ground the reckoning is quick: a man who wants you dead does not take you with the flat of it.

From the ground he sees the gate wire three paces off, and the legs, and the ramp, and under the truck bed a pool of urine spreading.

He tries to get up. The shoulder will not hold.

Then the one with the spade lowers it a hand's breadth. He holds it still in mid-air. And he moves aside, two paces, and leaves the road clear.

Then he says it.

Nobody is asking you to die for animals that are not yours.

And Ontiretse, on the ground, with dust in his mouth, does not answer. On the first half of it the man is right. On the last word he is right twice over, because they are not his, they never have been, and in six years nobody has given him one, not an old one, not a sick one.

The road is clear. Three paces and he is on it.

Ontiretse pushes himself up with his left hand, because the right does not answer properly, and he does not take the road. He goes to the gate.

The wire is twisted three times. He unwinds it with two fingers, turning it back the other way, and cuts himself under the nail and does not feel it. The tube is cold. The gate comes at him, heavy, creaks, and creaks loud because nobody is holding it.

Then he goes in among the animals, with his arms wide, and drives them out.

He does not whistle. He shouts the whistle, the two notes with his throat, and the animals do not answer on the second, they answer on the first, because a voice shouting is not the whistle they know and it is worse, and worse is what is needed.

They come out. They come out on the road side, through the men, under the ramp, over the ramp, and one of the three swears and lets go of the strap, and the strap slaps against the wood.

Sixty-one head scatter in six seconds. They go towards the ditch, towards the fields behind, towards the bend.

Ontiretse stands in the middle of the empty pen with the wire still in his hand.

In six years he has never opened that gate in the afternoon. And never on that side.

Bareng does not ask how he is.

He asks where they are.

Ontiretse says they are on the road and in the fields behind. He says it once and Bareng does not answer, and so he says it again, and adds that he opened the gate himself.

Bareng looks at him. Not at his face. He looks at the shoulder, which sits lower than the other.

Then he takes his phone and calls, and while he talks on the phone he walks back and forth in front of the door, four paces and four paces, and does not stop looking at the shoulder.

When he has finished he gives him his own water bottle, the real one, the glass one he keeps in the house, not the half plastic bottle Ontiretse carries to the pen and carries home every evening.

Then he goes to get the car.

It takes two days. On the second day, towards five, Bareng counts them in the yard, one by one, with his hand on the back of each the way things you can touch are counted.

Then he says it, without turning round, the way you say a time of day.

Sixty-one.

Ontiretse is leaning against the post of the new gate. He asks if they are all there.

Bareng says he said sixty-one.

And then Ontiretse asks the other thing.