Autumn 1991

He was watched. He had been watched all through the day from the early morning. It was late afternoon now, the sun was low over the golden outlines of the trees on the hills to the west of the valley, and he turned his slight body on the tractor seat to stare back hard at the big man who sat on a wooden chair by the door to the house. The tractor's wheels caught a rut in the field and jolted him, shook his spine through the thinning foam cushion on the iron seat. He lost sight of the hard eyes gazing at him from past the grazing fields, the big mulberry tree and the fencing close to the house that he had put up the previous spring.

They were two old, obstinate and opinionated men, and each in a moment of privacy would have called the other a valued friend, grudgingly, but times were difficult and changing for the worse, and on that day neither had called out a greeting or waved. They lived on opposite sides of the valley, separated by the Bunica river, and the events of the summer, now slipping away to autumn, had seemed to widen the differences of politics and culture; no wave and no greeting cry. Each would have thought it the role of the other to make the first gesture.

Above the noise of the engine he whistled to his dog. Years before he could have rounded up the cattle in the morning and the sheep in the afternoon on foot, but age had taken a toll of his knees and hips and he relied now on the tractor and the dog's skill. When the dog looked back to him for instructions he pointed towards the ford. In the morning, with his dog, he had brought the cattle back from the grazing fields, crossed the river with them, and driven them back to the fenced corrals by his barns; now he brought back the sheep.