Switchers by Kate Thompson Page A

goatness, had given her a new understanding of Kevin. He was the kind of boy that she knew her parents would view with contempt. They would mistrust his guarded and suspicious manner and be shocked by his outbursts of temper and foul language. He could not, by any stretch of the imagination be classified as ‘our kind of person’. But Tess had been into his world now, and experienced it from the inside. She knew how all those alien and conflicting feelings arose in him, and how he could not live the life he did without them.
    As Tess mused, she and Kevin were wandering slowly through the orchard and browsing on the leaves and twigs that fell within their reach. There were windfalls lying on the ground, apples and pears, but they were small and hard and bitter because of the long spell of cold. The leaves had suffered too, and those that had not already fallen were fibrous and dry, but to a goat they were as delicious as mature cheese.
    Tess was surprised by some of the things that she was learning. She found that it was a myth that goats would eat anything. On the contrary, her senses of smell and taste were so refined that she could tell in an instant whether a moth had laid eggs on a leaf or a bird dropping had landed there, even a month ago. She would leave anything that was the slightest bit tainted where it was on the tree, and eat carefully around it. She found that she had a rich and rare sense of her own independence, and that, much as she enjoyed the pleasure of Kevin’s company, she would depart from him without hesitation if the need arose. Nancy was still bleating on the other side of the hedge, and although Tess recognised that the sound held within it the desire for company, she knew that Nancy was calling for more than that. For stronger than every other emotion in a goat’s heart is the love of freedom. Even here, amid the luxury of the rich lands where food would never be scarce, her goat soul longed for the high, craggy places of the world, places which are of no use to mankind but are the wild, windy kingdoms of the goats.
    She and Kevin browsed their way peacefully to the edge of the orchard where two strands of barbed wire reinforced a neglected hedge. On the other side of it, cattle were grazing.
    Kevin turned to Tess, and the sly, mischievous glint was in his eye again. Tess knew that for the first time, she was returning it. Together they slipped through the fence as if it wasn’t there and strolled out into the field.
    The cattle stared, disconcerted, and swung to face them, blowing blasts of steaming air from their nostrils. For the hell of it, Kevin jumped at them, and they spun on their heels with surprising speed and careered away across the field. A goat can’t laugh, but Tess’s heart stretched with mirth as she watched them. Stupid creatures. She despised them.
    From where she and Kevin stood, they could see the neatly trimmed hedges of the nearest house, and with another quick glance of agreement, they set out towards it. Behind them the cattle recovered themselves and followed cautiously, closely grouped for safety.
    The garden they had seen proved to be impenetrable. The cattle were held back by barbed wire which prevented them from getting anywhere near the hedge, but this was no deterrent to the goats. Nor was the hedge itself, for it was immature and full of gaps. It was fortified, however, by a heavy chain-link fence that even a goat could not work loose, and the two sides of the property that had no hedge were guarded by a high stone wall. Tess and Kevin spent a while nibbling at the protruding sprigs of the hedge, but there was no damage they could do, so they left it and stepped out into the road.
    A goat can see over great distances and hear sounds from miles away if it chooses to do so. In the normal course of events, however, it doesn’t waste its attention in this way, but holds it to a much smaller radius around its immediate environment. It was not greatly surprising to