Tess smiled and took a picture. Then she turned to the county map tacked inside the truck door and compared the exposed strip with the route they needed to complete. The progress looked much smaller on paper. Nora noticed that Tess put the phone away before saying anything else.
By the fifth day, the excitement had changed. The goats browsed the same edges repeatedly because the thick interior canes did not give them room to step forward. They searched along the electric netting for a fresh opening and tested sections Nora thought were secure. Instead of advancing, they were beginning to walk the perimeter, spending more energy finding a better meal than eating the one in front of them.
On the sixth evening, Hazel stopped near a sagging corner of netting and bleated. Nora went to inspect it and found a length of old fence wire wrapped around the lower mesh. It had been hidden beneath leaves when she put the paddock up, and the goats had worked against it until the stakes loosened. She tried to free the wire before shutting off the charger, but a sharp crack of electricity made her release it and curse under her breath.
She cut the power, knelt in the wet ground, and began unwinding the tangle. Before she finished, another portion of the fence collapsed into the brush. The younger goats scattered through the cleared strip, confused by the sudden loss of the boundary they had learned. Nora called them back with a bucket of grain, counting each face as it appeared until all fifteen stood together again.
One doe lagged behind. Her name was Mercy, though Nora often said the animal did not live up to it. Mercy held one hind foot slightly off the ground, and a thin line of blood darkened the hair above her hoof. Nora caught her, cleaned the shallow cut, and checked carefully for deeper injury. Then she found the piece of wire that had caused it, buried point upward where the goats had been stepping.
The wound was small, but the lesson was not. Nora spent the next afternoon on her knees probing the ground, pulling rusty wire into a growing pile and marking places where the metal disappeared under roots. She found broken irrigation fittings, a loop of cable, and the rotten remains of a wooden post. Nothing in the county photographs had shown any of it.
On the eighth day, Tess arrived carrying the cash flow book. Nora was sitting on an overturned water bucket in the truck's shade, with three lengths of twisted wire laid beside her boots. The goats were resting near the gate, their bellies full enough for the moment but the thicket beyond them almost unchanged.
"We're spending more than the plan said," Tess announced. She opened the book and turned it toward her mother. "Posts, fence repairs, hauled water, fuel, bandages, the borrowed trailer, extra hours. And I haven't even put a number on your time."
"They need more time," Nora said.