Fernando and the others spent the rest of the day herding goats. This was both easier and more difficult than Fernando had anticipated. He’d constructed the pen in what he considered to be the optimal location based on the geography of the landscape and his observation of the goats’ grazing habits. It was a place he felt the animals would naturally gravitate toward.

He was right on this count. The old nanny goat and her latest batch of kids, who were always hanging about close to the shack anyway, had already trotted into the pen even before the final stakes had been driven in and wired. Others followed suit, meandering over of their own accord. They trickled in to drink from the troughs, to lounge in the shade of the shelter or just to hang about close to the growing herd. These onlookers were easily corralled.

Wild and wary, the ones who skulked about at the fringes of the yard took more convincing. They had to be chased and coerced. Flushed from the jungle brush, tugged by the horns and smacked on the haunches.

Worst of all was the big black billy goat. It bowled Pepe over and bit Tito on the forearm before springing into a deep weedy bower in the woods. Growlishly it baa-ed as Fernando caught it by the horns and dragged it back out, kicking and thrashing.

It took the combined efforts of he, Lalo and Chico to finally wrestle the devilish he-goat into the pen, and to bolt the gate shut behind it. The goat stamped and seethed, already loathing this forced domestication. Tossing its black-horned head, it stared balefully at Fernando through the fencing. Dashing sweat from his brow, Fernando smiled brutally back. Then he joined his friends resting in the grass.

Sprawled out flat on his back, Chico panted. “…That big black son of a bitch nearly killed me.”

Bone-tired, he and the others picked themselves up after a while. Waving weary good-byes to Fernando, the four young men shambled off toward town.

It was near sundown when Fernando’s grandmother returned from the jungle. She was not much impressed by the new goat pen. Clothed once again in her normal costumery, she eyed the fresh-hewn structures and their lazing, bleating occupants with a skepticism bordering on contempt.

“Am I to be their servant now, fetching them water and straw so they can lay about all day getting fat?”

“They could do with fattening up, Abuela, and so could you.” When she hmphed at him, Fernando smiled. “You’ll spend less time and energy tending to them like this than hunting them down to wherever they’ve wandered off.”

As the old woman stewed, he looked to the shack, to the rest of the yard, even to the shadowed trees beyond. In his mind’s eye, he reshaped them, transposing onto them neater and better forms. Fresh roofing and siding. Glass windows and new additions. Storage sheds and coops and kennels. Gardens of vegetables and pots of herbs. The land tilled and brought into prosperous order, its wildness reigned in to flourish tamely under his hand.

When he looked back to his grandmother, he saw that she had been looking at him. She gave him a long, searching glance.

“You’d like to pen me in too, wouldn’t you, nieto?”

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