The grass was exhausted, the weather was closing for the winter. His dog harried the flanks of the column of sheep and stampeded them towards and into the river at a place where his father and grandfather, and his grandfather's father and grandfather, had dumped cartloads of stones to create the ford. Husein and the man who watched him had only been away from their own villages, in a whole life-span, for the two years of conscripted military training, and that was more than forty years ago.

He looked back at the valley floor across the riverbank. He saw the good grazing fields and the arable fields where the summer's maize crop had been harvested, the vegetables grown in strips had been lifted and the stark lines of posts linked with wire above the cut-down vines. He looked beyond the yellowed grazing fields, the ploughed arable land and the weeded corridors between the vines, past the mulberry tree from which the leaves were flaking, and the house with the shallow porch from which Dragan watched him, and up the hill track, by the well, towards the other village where smoke bent from chimneys, and over the ochre of the trees that caught the last of the sun's strength. His hearing was no longer keen, but he thought he had heard strident voices coming from north and south, warring in the few seconds that his tractor had stalled. But with the engine now straining to carry him up the far bank such sounds were blotted out. As the wheels spewed water and slithered on the mudbank, he saw the pool upstream and the fine trace of the wormed long line he had left out for trout.

It was the fault of the radios. The radios that played in his own village, Vraca, spat out poison, as did the radios in the other village, Ljut. Against the tractor's engine, they were dead. He braked. He allowed the dog to take the sheep ahead. He stood up, to his full short, wiry height. He lifted his frayed cap from his sparse hair. His mouth, filled with ragged teeth, was set in a weathered walnut face below a greyed, drooping moustache.