Tess touched the map with one finger. The unfinished fire lane crossed the property like a thin promise in red pencil, disappearing beneath a dark patch of vegetation neither woman had entered. "More time doing this," Tess asked, "or more time finding a better way?"
Nora looked toward the green wall and did not answer immediately. She knew goats well enough to recognize when the animals had stopped solving the problem she had given them. What she did not know was the shape of the problem underneath the leaves. She had treated thirty-eight acres of unknown ground as though they were a large version of the pasture she had just lost. The land had given her eight days to discover that it was not.
That night, she spread the county map on her kitchen table and drew a line through her original grazing plan. There was no ceremony to it. She set the pen down, washed the dirt from her hands, and began again.
The next morning, Nora made the first narrow lane, not with the goats but with her own boots and a steel probe. She worked ahead of the future fence, shifting dead canes just far enough to see the ground, exposing wire before it could catch the netting, and marking buried obstacles with short stakes. Each finished section was only wide enough for her to walk safely on either side of the electric line. It looked absurdly small compared with the property, but she could inspect every foot of it, and for the first time she understood exactly where the animals would be working.
Tess arrived with four rolls of survey ribbon, a bound ledger, and a permanent marker. She tied red ribbon at the first lane, yellow at the next planned position, blue at the third, and white beyond that. Then she opened the ledger and wrote a column for each color. She listed entry and exit dates, browse taken, regrowth, water delivered, posts replaced, hazards found, and cost.
"You're turning my goats into a spreadsheet," Nora said.
"I'm turning your guesses into something we can check next Friday," Tess replied.
"They aren't guesses."
"Some of them aren't. That's why we should write down which ones."
Nora had never been especially fond of recordkeeping. She did invoices, remembered feed orders, and knew whether an animal had been lame on Tuesday or Thursday without writing it down. Tess had a different kind of memory, the sort that believed an observation became more useful after the observer forgot making it. Nora agreed to try the ledger for two weeks. She did not tell Tess how relieved she felt to have a method she could return to when the ground stopped making sense.
They set the first narrow paddock on a cool Monday. The goats entered hesitantly, accustomed now to the depleted strip near the gate, then discovered tender growth rising between older canes. Hazel stretched upward for greenbrier. Clover worked on the rose tips. The younger animals stripped privet leaves at the lower edge, and within an hour the confined lane looked as though a patient hand had passed through it, removing everything soft and green.