per, Barney."

Barney reached for a dipper hanging on a nail beside the kitchen door.
Hetty dipped out a small quantity of the milk, sipped, straightened up
with a jerk and spewed the milk out into the yard. "Yaawwwk," she
spluttered, "that tastes worse 'n Diesel oil."

She stirred distastefully at the swirling, flat-looking liquid in the
pails and then turned back to the kitchen. "I never saw the like of
it," she exclaimed. "Chickens come out with some kind of sorry-looking
egg and now, in the same morning, an eighteen hundred dollar
registered, fresh Guernsey gives out hogwash instead of milk." She
stared thoughtfully across the yard at the distant mountains, now
shimmering in the hot, midmorning sun. "Guess we could swill the hogs
with that milk, rather'n throw it out, Barney. I never seen anything
them Durocs wouldn't eat. When you get ready to put the other swill in
the cooker, toss that milk in with it and cook it up for the hogs."

Hetty went back into her kitchen and Barney turned and limped across
the yard to the tractor shed. He pulled the brim of his sweat-stained
Stetson over his eyes and squinted south over the heat-dancing sage and
sparse grasslands of Circle T range. Dust devils were pirouetting in
the hazy distance towards the mountains forming a corridor leading to
the ranch. A dirt road led out of the yard and crossed an oiled county
road about five miles south of the ranch. The county road was now the
only link the Circle T had to the cattle shipping pens at Carson City.
The dirt road arrowed south across the range but fifteen miles from the
ranch, a six-strand, new, barbed-wire fence cut the road. A white metal
sign with raised letters proclaimed "Road Closed. U.S. Government
Military Reservation. Restricted Area. Danger--Peligre. Keep Out."

The taut bands of wire stretched east and west of the road for more
than twenty miles in each direction, with duplicates of the metal sign
hung on the fence every five hundred yards. Then the wires turned south
for nearly a hundred miles, etching in skin-blistering, sun-heated
strands, the outlines of the Nevada atomic testing grounds at
Frenchman's Flat.

When the wire first went up, Hetty and her ranching neighbors had
screamed to high heaven and high congressmen about the loss of the road
and range. The fence stayed up. Now they had gotten used to the idea
and had even grown blase about the frequent nuclear blasts that rattled
the desert floor sixty mile