"Jay Lake - Pax Agricola" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

Pax Agricola
by Jay Lake

Joe Radford heard the bellow of a goat just outside his ancient Airstream trailer. Decades of experience
told him what that particular call meant -- a proud goat, somewhere she shouldn't be. Joe jumped up
from the kitchen table, scattering the spring seed packets he'd just gotten in the mail.

He ran outside to see Bella, the beautiful brown Nubian who was his oldest doe, in the garden nosing at
the last of his winter vegetables. Joe's other two goats explored the driveway. It was time to change the
latch on the goat pen again -- their tongues were like thumbs and patient as sin. He grabbed a spatula
rusting in the grass along with a stray trash can lid and banged them together. "Come on, girls!" he
shouted. "Back in the pen."

The two in the driveway, Cloris and Rosaline, scuttled nervously toward their familiar barnyard. Bella
gave him a baleful yellow-eyed glare and bent to the butternut squash. Joe shooed the other two goats
all the way in and, with a sigh of despair for his squash, stopped to chain the gate shut.

He left the lid and spatula behind -- the racket wouldn't impress Bella; she was too smart for that -- and
stalked into the garden. She'd knocked the wooden garden gate right off its hinges and torn the chicken
wire away with it. "Come on, girl," Joe said, making little clucking noises. He smiled in spite of the
damage to his vegetables. Bella was eating weeks' worth of his meals, but damn was she smart.

The goat suddenly staggered and collapsed against the half-buried gopher fence lining the squash row. A
second later, Joe heard the flat crack of a rifle shot. Stumbling through his Vietnam-honed reflex of
hitting the dirt, Joe ran to Bella. "God damned morons with hunting rifles," he muttered, as he slid to his
knees to calm the goat who bleated softly. Logic told him there wouldn't be a second shot from a
flustered hunter, but his back still had that target itch.

Bella had taken the bullet in the shoulder. Her flesh wasn't badly torn, but the real damage would be
inside. Joe took her jaw in his hand, stared at the barred pupils of her golden eyes. She glared back at
him, angry and ornery as ever, her musky goat smell mixed with the hot tang of blood. This goat wasn't
going to die, not in the next few minutes anyway. She was too pissed for that. Joe took off his
second-best work shirt, tore it in half and knotted the sleeve ends together to wind the rags around
Bella's shoulder and across her chest as a simple pressure bandage.

Half naked and daubed with the goat's blood, Joe trotted toward the wooded fence line separating his
property from Ralph Farney's just to the west -- a deer-and-quail hunting lease. By the time he got to
the barbed wire, a big red SUV was slewing down Ralph's access road, too fast for Joe to get the
plates.

Late February was out of season for deer anyway, so the idiot had to have been hunting on a quail
license. Couldn't resist that big brown doe glimpsed through the trees, no doubt. By sundown, the son
of a bitch who fired the shot would have his old frat brothers swearing he had been at the golf course
with them all day. Joe knew from long experience that Ralph would be ignorant of any wrongdoing.
Ralph made too much money off dumb-assed Austin lawyers to turn any of them in for a little violation
like this. The income made Ralph stupid, which pissed Joe off. He firmly believed that a little strife was
good for the soul -- damn it, he liked cranky neighbors; they left him alone -- but this was ridiculous.

Back in the garden Bella struggled to her feet. Helping her, Joe knew he should have the goat put down
and slaughtered, which would provide food for almost a whole season, but Bella was too good a friend