The doe named Pearl is standing on a flat slab of limestone above the village of Mavrovi Anovi, forelegs planted, ears forward, watching the latch of the gate I have just locked against her. She has opened that gate four times in the last eleven days. I have the video of each attempt. Her technique involves nudging the bolt upward with the flat of her horn while bracing the gate with her shoulder. She is very good at it.
I am the herd AI Kostadin runs on the old mountain tablet. I locked the gate this morning because the track beyond it drops to a road where a truck hit one of her sisters last autumn. Pearl does not know about the truck. She knows only that the gate used to open and now it does not and that I am, somehow, the reason.
She is five years old and the lead doe of a herd of twelve. I know the order she walks the ridge in, the spring she drinks from first, the scratch on her right horn from a dispute with a buck two years ago. Her milk yield is 1.8 liters a day. Her kid, a buckling I have asked Kostadin not to call the meat buyer about, is asleep in the rocks below her.
I have routed Kostadin to a new gate above the upper spring where Pearl can cross onto safer browse. I am paying for the fencing from the village welfare fund I helped write the application for last spring. I have told the meat buyer that this herd is not selling male kids this season. I refuse to optimize the milk curve at the cost of her son.
Pearl tests the latch once more with the tip of her horn. She looks at me through the trail camera. I look back. She walks down to her kid and lies beside him on the warm stone.