The imam argued that, removed as the village was from the capital and its arcane politics, the Americans could have no possible interest in it. The only contact they would ever know would come in the form of the planes seen far overhead. If Younis’s father ventured to make a counterargument, that there existed a real and imminent danger, it didn’t seem to make an immediate impression. So when Azar’s youngest son, who was no more than ten years old, told his father that he had watched that very afternoon as a patch of reeds along the river moved in an unnatural way, counter to the current and the prevailing mountain wind, it was written off as a figment of the youngster’s imagination. And when Jangi Shah’s middle son claimed to have found a boot print in the dew-moistened earth at the base of the rise to the west of the village, he fetched his friends to go and take a look. But one of the boys stepped on it by accident, blurring the impression and making it impossible for anyone else to tell for sure what it was.
