Since the big rain there has been no other rain and the remnant floodwater vanishes an inch or more a day and then it is gone and with it the midges. The grasses there yellow until they brown and are sloughed off like a scalp by wind and by sheep and it is not long before the grasses of the matorral entire follow in kind and with each bleary sun Gorka drives his flock to graze one fewer plot. The sheep rove corralled in tight huddles and not far under the watch of the hired dogs and eat until there is only the sagging cheatgrass and knapweed and spurge that Gorka feeds by hand to lambs as forage. At night he must set up a bivouac to keep them confined until he wakes from fitful sleep and drives them one plot over or come noon to a beggarly wafer of shade. He eats what Irati brings him from stores she says will soon be wanting. She says the dead trapper’s house was collapsed and his widow flown. When the cool of the morning wears off she watches a colony of ants make a husk of a bluetailed skink or a woodlark hatchling whose little bones blanch in the heat. They are fast, she says. I suspect they may be the only ones eating well. As days pass they do so more cloudlessly than those that preceded them and the sun seethes like a slag of scoria so white it has no color. The matorral shimmers. Its shrubs are skeletal. The river is low, she says. The sheep bleat. The dogs pant and whine. Where there are no grasses the wind takes the soil. They move plot to plot until the land is picked clean and denuded and he has not even provender to feed them. The sheep lose weight. They will die, Gorka, she says. They will never again yean a lamb. We cannot lose them, he says. Under the wool you can see the sheep’s spines knuckled up like pyrenees. It is a mercy, she says. Already we have lost so many, he says. These we will lose, too, she says. I am no knacker, he says. You must be, she says. You will abet me, he says. I will not, she says. I am no knacker. You will not do the difficult things that may sustain us, he says. I build monuments around the difficult things you abdicate, she says. I am no knacker. He strops a long knife on a whetstone and he culls the sheep in the sheepfold unnumbered and he culls them to the very last of them and his clothing when he is finished is so rank and laden with blood it is as though he has been steeped in the dye of madder.

⇠