“Fanwell’s dog is very happy here,” said Puso. “Look at him, Mma. He is smiling.”

Mma Ramotswe looked at the dog. Puso was right: its mouth seemed fixed in a wide, gum-revealing grin.

“We should give him a name,” she said. “We cannot call him Fanwell’s dog.”

“We could call him Zebra,” said Motholeli. “This is Zebra Drive and he lives here now. Zebra would be a good name for him.”

Puso agreed. “Is that all right with you, Mma?” he asked. “Can we call him Zebra?”

She had been more concerned with Motholeli’s saying the dog now lived here. It is too late, she thought; Zebra is no longer temporary—he is permanent.

She left the children and went inside. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had arrived back from the garage a few minutes before her, and had put on the kettle.

“You go and sit on the verandah, Mma,” he said. “I will bring you your tea. We can talk there.”

She imagined that he would want to talk about Zebra, and about the dog’s precise status. She rehearsed in her mind what she would say. Permanent. Perhaps that single-word answer would be best. Or she might say, “The children have decided the matter for us.” That had the merit of truth, but it seemed, in a way, to be transferring responsibility for the decision to them rather than accepting it herself. Perhaps she might say, “What alternative do we have?” And then she would wait to see if he could come up with something, which she doubted he would be able to do.

She need not have worried.

“That dog seems to have settled quite well,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni as he took his first sip of tea. “He’ll be a useful guard dog.”

“Yes,” she said. She had not anticipated he would be that accepting. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni liked dogs well enough, but had expressed concern about the responsibility of keeping one. But then there had been a spate of break-ins recently—small thefts of garden tools and the like, but it was enough for him to be concerned. Cautiously, she asked, “You don’t mind, do you?”

He shrugged. “Not really—these break-ins, you see…It’s the one thing that will deter a burglar. You can build fences as high as you like, you can put big locks on your gates, but it is always dogs that look after your property.”

She looked into her teacup. There had been a time when locks had been virtually unknown in Botswana, when you could leave your possessions anywhere with the confidence that they would be there when you returned, when there was no point in stealing because people would see you with some item that they knew you did not own and would draw their own conclusions. That had changed, at least in the towns; it was different in the country, where the old ways still prevailed.