There were six of them, five ewes and a bellwether. The ewes were all in milk, and their swollen udders made them reluctant to move as long as grass was within cropping range. For two days I whacked them along from dawn to dark, driving them until their udders were no longer swollen but thin and dry, and they hated me and my stick as much as I hated them and their stubborn bony rumps. But they saved my life and the life of a girl named Cora whom I didn’t like and with whom I had nothing in common except that we were both Americans in a strange land, both press reporters, and both expecting to die, after some preliminary nastiness, if we were caught. The Security police of the People’s Free Federal Republic were hours, possibly only minutes, behind us when we came on the goats, grazing on a hillside pasture. We were pushing through a cornfield we had reached at the end of a pointless, planless, frantic dash to get away and out of sight, anywhere, before Security came for us.
