MMA RAMOTSWE did not like driving at night. She was not a timid driver, but she knew that there was one danger on the roads at night against which no amount of care could protect one—wandering cattle. Cattle liked to stand on the roadside at night and would suddenly step out into the paths of oncoming cars, almost as if they were curious to find out what lay behind the headlights. Perhaps they thought that the headlights were torches, held by their owners, and came out to see if they brought food; perhaps they were looking for warmth and thought the lights were the sun. Perhaps they thought nothing in particular, which was always possible with cattle, and with some people too, for that matter.

Mma Ramotswe’s friend Barbara Mooketsi was just one of the many people Mma Ramotswe knew who had collided with a cow at night. She had been driving down from Francistown late one evening and had hit a cow north of Mahalapye. The un-fortunate animal, which was black, and therefore almost com-pletely invisible at night, had been scooped up by the collision and had entered the car through the windscreen. One of its horns had scraped Mma Mooketsi’s shoulder and would have killed her had she been sitting in a slightly different position. Mma Ramotswe had visited her in her hospital bed and had seen the myriad of cuts on her face and arms from the shattered glass. This was the danger of driving at night, and it had been enough to put her off. Of course, in the town it was different. There were no cattle wandering about, although sometimes they drifted into the outlying parts of Gaborone and caused accidents there.

Now, leaving the edge of the town and peering into the darkness ahead of her, she searched the road for obstacles. It was not much of a road—a track ploughed out of the red earth and eroded into tiny canyons by the rains. Note’s people lived in the village at the end of this track, along with some twenty other families. It was the sort of place that was halfway between town and country. The young people here would work in Gaborone and walk out along this track to the main road each morning to catch a minibus into town. Others would live in town and come out for weekends, when they would slip back into the role of village people, looking after cattle and ploughing a few meagre fields.