He made a pencil revision on his own copy and promised to email an annotated plan. The lane would still reach the culvert. It would simply follow ground they had already begun to understand. Nora felt relief, followed almost immediately by fresh alarm when he listed what was left: hardened travel surface in a few wet sections, overhead clearance, a safe turning area, and enough width for emergency vehicles to reach the culvert without catching branches.
"Goats won't finish all that," Talley said.
"No," Nora agreed. "But they might let me finish it without breaking a machine."
Talley looked through the openings toward the numbered tree guards. "What are those?"
"We're figuring that out."
He examined the nearest broad trunk, then the measured line between it and the next. For a moment, he looked as intrigued as Tess had been. But he only said, "Well, don't put your fire lane through anything you might want to keep for another fifty years."
The county visit changed the final weeks of clearing. Nora stopped trying to make every new lane serve two purposes at once. She reserved one team of days for the access route and another for exploring the suspected tree rows, and Tess marked the distinction in separate colors. It felt like surrendering a piece of the discovery, but the October deadline did not move merely because the land had become interesting.
They cut a cross lane toward the culvert, working into vegetation thicker than anything the goats had faced so far. Long dead canes were woven over fallen hardwood, with old wire strung through the lowest layer in loops that could catch a boot. Nora spent hours inspecting short stretches before placing the netting. The goats took the soft green growth, and then she and Tess removed the exposed dead material with loppers, gloves, and patient hands.
On the worst day, Nora found a coil of rusted cable beneath a mat of stems that looked solid from above. She imagined the blade of a brush cutter catching it at full speed and understood why the previous contractors had decided the property was not worth the machinery. That afternoon, she and Tess hauled the cable out with a chain pulled carefully from open ground. It came free in sections, bringing dead leaves and black soil with it.
The work was unglamorous. The goats ate, rested, and returned to their trailer while the women stood in the heat sorting metal from wood. Their arms were scratched through their sleeves, and sweat made the dust cling to every inch of skin. When Tess complained that the goats were getting all the public credit, Nora told her to send the animals the bill for everything they could not eat.