“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

“Thank you, Steven,” she said, absently reaching with two fingers for another sardine and holding it up by its tail. “Here, Greta.”

Fifteen miles from where Dagmar sat communing with her turtles, in a sprawling ranch house in the cool, interior uplands of the island, her nephew Axel Torkelsson was having an argument with his wife Malani. A friendly argument, to be sure, but vexing all the same. As usual, it was about ranch expenditures.

Alone among the four Torkelsson nephews and nieces that constituted the current generation, Axel was carrying on the family’s ranching tradition. He’d been bitten early by the cattle-ranching bug; at thirteen he’d declared to his Uncle Magnus that he would study rangeland management and ecology when he went to the University of Hawaii. He had, too, with Magnus’s generous financial help, and he’d rarely regretted it.

Like the others, he had inherited a sizable piece of the 30,000-acre Hoaloha Cattle Ranch that his uncles and aunt had built, but while the rest-his sisters Inge and Hedwig and his brother Felix-had put theirs to other uses, Axel had kept his 11,000 acres as a ranch-the Little Hoaloha.

No one would mistake him for a sinewy, rough-riding cowboy, either by physique or by temperament, but he was devoted to the idea of building and maintaining a productive, profitable cattle ranch according to modern, ecologically sound principles of livestock management and production. The trouble was, you had to spend money to make money, and when it came to spending money, Malani, who kept the books, was a tough sell.

Today’s dispute was about a new retinal scanning system for the herd, which he dearly wanted, and he was at his most bright-eyed and enthusiastic. “Honey, try to look at this reasonably. Retinal scan would give us a tremendously more accurate database for breeding and for life history, and for disease control. I mean, think about the mad cow scare on the mainland.”