I nodded, grateful she recognized this.

  “But your powers of observation,” she said, “make it all the more puzzling that you can’t see my glaring defects.”

  “I have to say,” I said, “there is nothing much different about your horns. Every other goat I’ve seen has two, and they’re all basically the same color, and they curl away from your heads the same way, and they get pointy at the ends. I’ve observed this about all of your horns, I’ve compared and contrasted, and they’re all basically the same.”

  She scoffed. She really did. I was beginning to like her, then she scoffed. Scoffing is not the sound a friend makes.

  “But you left out the most important part,” she said, smiling in a way that made me feel a little silly. “It’s not the length, or the curvature, or the color that matters,” she said. “It’s the formation of the cross-lines.”

  It took her some time to explain this in a way that allows me to explain it to you. Apparently, in the world of goats, there are lines that go horizontally across each horn, and to goats, the pattern of these lines is of great importance. The best kinds of lines, Helene told me, are both wavy and parallel. The next-best kinds are straight and parallel. “Parallel is just the baseline for normalcy,” she said.

  Now I looked closely at Helene’s horns. The lines on hers were not parallel. Some were wavy, and some straight, and some loopy, and some were even crisscrossed. But even after I noticed these differences, I backed up for a second and could barely see any lines at all.

  “Now you can imagine the horror I inflict on others when they see me,” Helene said. “They tell me about this horror, all the time. So I try to stay out of the way, so as to cause as little suffering as possible.”

  * * *

  —

  I thought about this as I headed home. I had never known anyone who had these sorts of thoughts about themselves, these low opinions about some aspect of their physical form, these odd ideas about the right kinds of stripes on one’s horns. I thought about how I might convince Helene that she looked fine, that she looked like every other goat. Or rather, she seemed to me to be just the right amount of different from every other goat.

  I made my way through the park, avoiding the roads, avoiding the well-trod paths and absolutely avoiding the plaza, until I finally arrived home, only to find my home had become a wall.

  It was a wall!

  A human had done this. That much I knew. The hole in the tree where I entered my home was now a wall of gray cement. I had seen this before. Many years ago. When the Control-the-Animals people or the Parks People wanted to close off a hollow, they did this. I remembered there was a small, very small, hollow of a tree where humans would put garbage, and eventually that hollow was made into a cement wall.

  But that had been so long ago.

  And no humans knew of my hollow.

  Except apparently they did.

  I sat and looked at this wall for some time, knowing that it was impenetrable but also not believing that my home was no longer available to me. That it had ended. That my hollow was now a wall.

  Only occasionally have I felt real anger toward humans. I felt it toward Twisty, my captor, and once or twice I have felt it toward the drivers of vehicles who drive recklessly, who endanger us animals and also their fellow humans.

  But I have never felt real anger toward the humans who work in this park. They seem to love the park like we love the park. But this was cruel. It was intentional. They knew an animal lived in this hollow. They must know that animals live in hollows! And still they made my home into a wall.

  Why?

  TWENTY-SIX

  I thought about who lived closest. It was Sonja, who lived just down the hill. I went to her and even before I announced myself she had clambered out of her burrow and had come to me, rubbing sleep from her eye.

  “I smelled you and heard you,” she said groggily, “and I saw what they did. I’m so sorry. It must have been today.”

  Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that they had done this in the last few hours. It had to be. How had they known I would be gone?

  “It’s a nasty thing,” she said. “Nasty and brutish.”

  I had never heard her so passionate. Her anger made me feel good. I can’t explain it. It’s like she took the fire inside me, put it in a torch, and then set it between us. It was no longer just mine.

  “Tonight sleep here,” she said. “There’s plenty of room.”

  When I looked doubtful, she pushed some eucalyptus leaves out of the way to reveal that her dugout was vast—interrupted only by sticks and logs that we shoved away to make room.

  That night I slept fitfully. I was used to the smell of my own home, my own things, and Sonja’s dwelling was cleaner than mine, and smelled only of dirt and Sonja herself. While my nose tried to get used to this clean-Sonja smell, my mind was darting around, thinking of the terrible thing the humans had done to my home, and about the coyote or coyotes who might be roaming our park. In all my millions of days, so much had never happened in so short a span. I was dizzy and dazed and did not find rest till the night’s smallest hours.

  At first light I snuck out, careful not to wake Sonja, and I ran to the ocean, wanting space, wanting light and air. I sprinted on the beach, helping the world turn, and when I was tired I jogged across the road to the windmill, looking for the goats and specifically for Helene.

  * * *

  —

  I found her, as I had before, alone.

  “Oh hi!” she said when she saw me. She had a beautiful voice, musical like birdsong, crisp like fresh rain.

  I looked around and noticed that the endless expanse of weeds was just about gone. “Did you goats eat all of this?” I asked.

  “Oh sure,” she said. “And we’ve actually been going sort of slow compared to usual. The prickly weeds take a bit longer than the non-prickly weeds. You should see us go at those! You’re up early. Any special reason?”

  There was something so open about her, her eyes so warm and her voice so clear, that I told her about my hollow becoming a wall, and by the end my voice was breaking and my throat was closing and my eyes were wet and I was angry at myself for letting all of these things happen. But she looked at me with great kindness and just the right amount of annoyance.

  “That is just awful,” she said. “Who would do such a thing?”

  “Some humans, I assume,” I said.

  “Well, that is unacceptable,” she said. “Just unacceptable. Though I suppose I don’t have a home, either.”

  She told me that she and her fellow goats were shuttled from place to place, and usually slept in the open air, and that as far as she could remember, she’d rarely, if ever, slept in the same place twice.

  Now it was my turn to think something was unacceptable.

  “But it’s what I’m used to,” she said. “The adventure of new places, new sights, makes it worthwhile.”

  The thought of new places got me thinking about the Bison, and I told Helene about my plan to free them.

  “Bison, eh?” she said. “I’ve seen Bison. I remember one time traveling on a train for many days, and when we stopped, we were in a vast plain ringed by snowy mountains. And all around us were Bison. They are picky eaters.”

  There was so much in what she said, so many revelations and mysteries, that I paused for a moment to take them in. First, she said she had seen Bison, many Bison, somewhere other than here, and that took my breath away. I had only known the three Bison here, so had never considered the possibility that there could be more, many more, somewhere across the sea. And they lived where? In a vast plain ringed by snowy mountains?

  I did not know this word, snowy, and asked her about it. She explained snow—not that it made any sense, really; it seemed so silly and unnecessary and weird—and then, once she was done, I realized I didn’t know what the word mountain meant, either.

  “A mountain is like a rock, but a hundred thousand times bigger,” she said, and this made little sense to me, either. She seemed to know I was confused.

  “You see that boulder over there?” she asked, and nodded to the great boulder on the beach, which served as the end point of the sand as we knew it. I’d never been beyond this boulder, actually. It was jagged and steep and there seemed to be no point in climbing it—especially given it was covered in bird feces.

  “Well,” Helene said, “a mountain is like that boulder, but so much huger. If it took you ten seconds to climb that boulder, it would take you ten days to climb a mountain.”

  This to me made sense. Much of what Helene said made sense, and opened my eyes—so much so that I spent every day with her for some time, listening and asking questions and hearing her talk about things like deserts and lakes and creatures I’d never heard of and scarcely believed. She described animals with impossible combinations of fur and hooves and horns, and in numbers that overwhelmed my mind. Everything she said about the main-land made it seem that not only were we on an island, but we were on a very small island, which contained only a fraction of things that existed in the world.

  Helene described these things casually, never allowing me to feel ignorant, and when I told her stories of the park, she listened closely and asked very good questions, laughing and oohing at all the right times. She was a very good talker and a very good listener, and I have to admit I drank from her mind as I would a perfect spring after a long hot day.

  For the next dozen days, I was still doing my rounds, and still reported to the Bison each day, but afterward I would return to Helene to hear more about all I did not know. And because I no longer had a home, these nights I slept near Helene. She had a knack for choosing spots under the brambly trees that kept us warm from the ocean breeze, and we talked until we fell asleep. Then, almost immediately I would go on dreaming of all she’d said.

  The next day, we’d begin again. Usually, at some point while we talked, I would catch a familiar shadow crossing over us, and I knew it was Bertrand. He would fly over us, high above, and I knew he saw us. Each time I would look up to him, and tell him to come say hello, to chat with me and Helene—for I wanted very much for him to hear all I was hearing, to share his own stories with her—but each time, the moment I invited him to join us, he would glide away like he hadn’t heard me. It was very unusual behavior for Bertrand, and I planned to ask him about it someday.

  On one of these occasions, when I was looking up at Bertrand’s retreating silhouette, Helene saw my eyes to the sky and she smiled. “You like the Sun?” she asked.

  I found this to be a very strange question, one I had never heard. The Sun was the beginning of everything in the world, and gave me life and gave life to all I knew, so yes, I thought, I like the Sun. What’s not to like?

  “Of course I like the Sun,” I said. “Actually I love the Sun. The Sun is God.”

  She laughed.

  I mentioned that Helene scoffed once before, and scoffing is not the sound a friend makes. But this, this laugh, was worse. By this time I liked Helene a great deal, and found her to be a fount of knowledge and spectacular stories, but her ability to make these mean sounds was a distinct problem.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did you say that the Sun was God?”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “And clouds are her messengers.”

  “You don’t say!” she said. “And what about rain?”

  “Rain is only rain,” I said. All this was so elementary to me that I felt, for a moment, that Helene was joking with me. How could she not know these things? Island or main-land, these facts were foundational.

  Helene looked up at the Sun, wearing an enigmatic smile.

  “If you say so,” she said, and went back to eating. I watched her chew for ten or so heartbeats, and then had to press her.

  “You don’t think the Sun is God?” I asked.

  “Well, this is the first I’ve heard that,” she said, which seemed to me an impossibility. “But you could be right! Maybe it is God. Either way seems good.”

  I didn’t know where to start. Helene was referring to the Sun as it instead of she, which was very bothersome to me. But more annoying than that was this bizarre idea, expressed so blithely, that the Sun was not God. Or that such an undebatable fact of existence was a maybe-yes, maybe-no question, like whether or not ducks were reliable or pupusas were delicious.

  “Are you saying,” I said, “that there’s a fiery orb in the sky that gives us all life, but that she isn’t God? That she’s just some random ball of fire?”

  Now Helene stopped eating and looked warmly up at me. “You’re probably right,” she said. “It’s just not a topic I’ve thought that much about. It could be that the sun is God and makes everything nice and good. Or it could be that the sun is just like me or you or that boulder with the bird feces on it.”

  “Just another thing?” I asked. I was so baffled and offended I could barely form words.

  “Right,” she said, oblivious to my baffled state. “Not that it’s not important. It is! But the rest of all we know and see is important, too. The ocean. The air. The land. The trees and sand and stones. Even the worms! All things equal and equally important.” And again, as if she’d been talking about food or fungus, she went back to eating. Then another voice was heard.

  “Who are you talking to, Strange-Stripes?” This was the voice of another goat, who seemed to be on the other side of a thick bush. His tone was mocking.

  “A friend,” Helene said to the voice on the other side of the bush. Then she turned to me and whispered, “Is it okay that I called you a friend?”

  And even though she had just said a bunch of things that rattled my mind and caused me some confusion and even hurt feelings, I very much liked Helene and yes, considered her a friend. A new friend, which is a very exciting kind of friend. So in answer to her question, I wanted to say Of course! And Yes! And Your voice fills me with happiness! And You fill me with images of freedom and adventure!

  But I only said, “Yeah, sure.”

  Now a second voice came from the bush.

  “Strange-Stripes has a friend? This I have to see.” This second voice seemed very unpleasant—more unpleasant than the first. And even more unpleasant was realizing that the other goats called my friend Helene by this ugly name, Strange-Stripes.

  Now there was a rustling in the bush, which I took to mean that these two unpleasant goats were actually coming around to get a look at me, this new friend of Helene’s. I was ready to stand my ground when they saw me, but I was also a bit afraid they would say mean things to me, too. When they came around the bush, though, they immediately lowered their eyes and knelt like I was a king.

  “Sir!” one goat said. I was almost sure he was talking to me.

  “So sorry, sir!” the other said. I was almost sure this second one was talking to me, too. They were very deferential. It felt so odd, but also sort of good, having these recently cruel goats suddenly so worshipful and meek. I looked over to Helene, whose mouth had formed itself into the slightest smirk.

  “We didn’t realize who we were talking to,” the first goat said.

  “The shrubbery was in our way,” the second said. “We really meant no offense, sir. Your Sirness. Your Powerfulness. Sorry.”

  “We really meant no disrespect,” the first added. “It was a very thick sort of shrubbery.”

  * * *

  —

  I will explain.

  These goats, and most goats, are herd animals. They clump together and move as a group. And they usually have a different creature that moves them around, guides them and shoos them and basically tells them where to go. And these moving-around creatures are of two types: humans and dogs.

  I am a dog. You know this. So when these two goats saw me, they snapped in line. They bowed down. They were ready to obey. Which meant that the rest of the goats would do the same. I didn’t need them to snap in line or bow down or anything like that, but to have them treat Helene with dignity? I had that power.

  There are times in this life when I have been surprised by the words I say. The words that I should be wholly aware of and in control of. But sometimes they seem to be channeled from some other place—from the sky, from the past, from a nobler version of myself. And such a group of words came from my mouth at that moment.

  I said, “You disappoint me.”

  I said this to the cruel goats who were sneering and snickering at my friend Helene. And then I stared at them for a very long time. Oh the looks in their eyes! It was something like terror, something like apology, something like shame.

  “We are so sorry,” one of them said.

  “We are embarrassed,” the other said.

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see Helene. Her eyes were a thousand times bigger than before—she couldn’t believe what she was seeing and hearing.

  “I think you can do better,” I said to the goats, and immediately they nodded so vigorously I feared their heads would fall from their necks.

  “Thank you, sir,” one said. “For taking the time to educate us.”

  “And for your faith in us,” said another.

  And then I went further, and even while saying these next words, I worried I was going far too far.

  “Henceforth, among your kind, there will be no differentiation based on tiny deviations of physical form. There will be no snickering based on things like the sort of cross-stripes one of you has or doesn’t have, or the direction one’s fur goes, or the color of your eyes or hooves. Such behavior is an affront to the dignity of your species. Is that understood?”

  The two goats before me nodded gravely, and I looked beyond them to see that a crowd of other goats had heard, too, and were fixed in place, grave agreement in their eyes.