Page 64 of Duty Preserved

“Whoever’s here. These are open to anyone herding animals through this area. Rangers, locals, whoever. Nobody assigns it. They just show up and fix what’s broken.”

Every bit of it was improvised. But every repair told you someone had come back, found what was broken, and fixed it with what was available. It was a collage of community effort. They were people who understood that good enough, repeated, was better than perfect.

“The cattle know it,” Sarah said. “Some of them have been here more times than we have.”

The herd had already begun to drift toward the opening in the wall. The lead cows angled for the gap on their own. They knew what that wall meant. The rest of the column followed, the whole herd pulling itself forward like water finding a drain.

The boma needed work before it could hold them, though.

Gaps had opened since last season. Sections of mesh had sagged where something heavy had leaned into them. A stretch of thorn brush near the entrance had been pushed through entirely, leaving a hole wide enough for a cow to walk out of.

Everyone immediately set upon the work at hand.

Sarah was in there with the rangers before I’d even put my stick down. She grabbed the loose end of a wire strand and hauled it taut while one of the younger rangers hammered a post deeper with a rock. She gave him a direction in broken Swahili, and he adjusted without hesitating. Then she moved to the next section, pulling branches back into place and weaving them into the existing wall with both hands buried in the thorns.

Fortunately, we Citadel guys were no foreigners to the construction of makeshift barricades. Andrew and I had spent careers building things under pressure. For the first time on this whole drive, I wasn’t learning a new language or trying to read a cow’s ear. I could just work intuitively. Andrew had a wooden pole across his shoulders and was fitting it into place along a weak stretch of wall while two rangers held it steady. Cole worked beside Baraka at the far end, resetting fence posts that had listed sideways.

We closed the gaps. Tightened the mesh. Reinforced the low spots with whatever the rangers pulled from the supply vehicles. More wire and poles to lash brush together. Sheets of corrugated tin that had been stacked in the back of one of the trucks. I braced a sagging section while Zayn wired it to the post beside it, both of us pulling in opposite directions until the tension held.

“Tighter,” he said.

I pulled harder. The wire bit into my palms. He twisted the ends together and gave it an approving nod.

The work was fast and hard, and nobody talked much beyond the necessary. By the time we finished, the boma was solid.

The cattle had been milling at the entrance the whole time we worked. Jomo stepped to the gap and called them forward, those same cadenced sounds and whistle sequences that had moved the herd all day, and the lead cows walked through without any pressure from the flanks. The rest followed. The column compressed and funneled and poured into the enclosure.

Jomo’s last call hung in the air as the final stragglers pushed through. He stepped back from the gap, and three rangers moved in behind him to close it off with the heaviest section of mesh.

We made camp outside the boma. Everyone slept in the open, close to the fires. The rangers started building them before the light was fully gone, three fires spaced around the perimeter, each one big enough to throw heat and light in a wide arc. The fires stayed lit all night. That was the system. Lions wanted the cattle, not a ring of people making noise around open flames.

The rangers would take turns moving around until dawn. They would talk, play a soft radio, and express other forms of general human merriment. That was the entirety of the deterrent.

Dinner was whatever the camp cooks had packed for us before we left. Cold food passed around the fires. Flatbread, dried meat, fruit that had survived the journey in canvas bags. Andrew ate his sitting against a bedroll with his long legs stretched out in front of him. Cole was working the day’s dust out of his pistol with a rag. He’d heard the bit about noise and fire being the whole deterrent and looked about as convinced as I’d expected.

Everyone was spent. A full day of walking behind livestock in equatorial heat had a way of leveling the difference between an operator with twenty years of fieldwork and a twenty-year-old ranger who’d been doing this since he was a kid. We were all equally done.

The food disappeared. People spread across the three fires and leaned back against packs and bedrolls. The conversations thinned as exhaustion won.

Sarah sat beside me at ours. She’d undone her braid after dinner, her auburn hair loose around her shoulders. She’d pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, watching the flames.

She’d been right there all evening, working beside operators and rangers alike. She hadn’t held anything back.

I couldn’t stop wanting to be closer to her than I thought social norms of the camp would allow. People all around us and the six inches between her shoulder and mine somehow felt farther than the whole journey we’d already traveled today.

“How do your arms feel?” she asked.

“Like I spent twelve hours herding cattle and then rebuilt a wall out of thorn brush.”

“So, good?”

“Outstanding.”

She laughed quietly, and the sound of it was almost enough to make the day worth living through twice.

At the second fire, I spotted Cole and Alyson. They seemed to be talking. I couldn’t hear them from here. Cole sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward, engrossed in whatever she was saying. Alyson was gesturing with one hand, surprisingly animated even at the end of a day like this.

“Is Alyson still with Daniel?” I asked.