But he had been with these people for seven weeks and he would have reckoned it ungracious to slip away before their celebration, with himself and his dog as the honoured guests. Soon he would drive the dog back to his home on the outskirts of Osijek, where it would go into its pen, and he would sit at a desk, read papers, study maps and learn the detail of the next site he was to be assigned to.

There was no shortage of work. The government said that a quarter of a million mines had been laid during the war, but more realistic studies put the figure at close to a million. They had been in the ground now for seventeen, eighteen or nineteen years and had lost none of their lethal potential, were as deadly as the day when the spades had made the holes in the fields, the mines had been dropped into them and covered with earth. When the dog’s working life was over, it would go to his father and live out its last years as a pampered pet, and he would take on another dog, a two-year-old with its training just completed. When that dog was ready to finish there would still be the seeded fields all over his country where the conflict line had been.

The day he had started to work on strips of land at the edge of the cornfields round the village, close to where the Vuka river flowed, he had explained his tactic to the farmer on whose land he would be. He had said that mechanical flails mounted on an armoured bulldozer were acceptable on flat fields, but useless and dangerous on the steep-sloped riverbanks. He said, too, that if the clearance were to be done by hand, men on their knees with fine probes, it would take for ever, and this area did not warrant priority, so it was him and the dog. They worked along yellow tape lines, King a few metres ahead, on a long, loose lead, finding them; there were at least twenty, all primed, all killing agents. The dog could smell explosive chemicals, could smell also the fine metal filament wires that would trip the unwary and detonate a device. He had talked of the acoustic signature that the wires gave off, which the dog could hear when a man could not. He had thought the farmer cared only for another hectare made available to plant more corn or sunflowers.