He got up from the table, and he went to the rack by the back door, and he took down his father's rifle.
He loaded it at the kitchen table. Five cartridges out of the yellow box in the drawer, one after another through the loading gate on the side of the receiver, the brass cold and slick in his fingers. His hands were steady. That surprised him. He levered one into the chamber and let the hammer down to half cock with his thumb, the way his father had taught him at the age of nine, and he set the rifle across the table in front of him, beside the plate of peaches, and he sat there and looked at it.
He did not go out. If Albin Kasper wanted something from him, Albin Kasper could come to the house and knock like a man. He would check the heifers at eight like he had said, and if there was anybody in his barn at eight he would deal with it then.
On channel nine Werner Haumann was telling Dorit he would try to get the tractor out along the fence toward the Tolstad line. Arne turned the volume down to a murmur.
Eight came. He did not go out. He sat at the table. Fly lay at the back door with her nose to the crack under it, and every few minutes she got up and walked to him and looked at him and walked back. At half past eight she began to whine. At nine she was standing, and the whine had become a steady thin sound in her throat that did not stop, and he said, "Lie down," and she did not lie down. He said it again. She looked at him with her sky eye and did not lie down.
At twenty minutes to ten she went at the door.
She went at it with both front feet, scrabbling, digging, her nails tearing at the paint on the bottom panel the way they had torn at the gate on the day the sheep left, and she was barking now, barking and barking, high and hoarse, and when he stood up and said her name she turned and ran at him and grabbed his sleeve and pulled him toward the door, and he had never in eleven years seen her do anything like it.
He opened the door.
The wind came in like water. It filled the porch and the kitchen and blew the lamp flame flat in its chimney and scattered the Purina calendar across the floor, and under it, under the enormous white roar of it, he heard a heifer bawling. Not the low complaining moan of a heifer in labor. The other sound. The high, cracked, terrified bellow of an animal that is hurt or trapped or both, a sound that goes right into the spine of anybody who has ever heard it, and it was coming from the barn.