There was silence. In Botswana, the sale or slaughter of one’s cattle is the last resort; it is the last thing that anyone wishes to do. Cattle were the ultimate security, the property that stood before the very gates of indigence and kept them from opening. Once one had sold the cattle, there would be nothing left to sell.

Mma Ramotswe nodded her reply. “I have a large herd,” she said. “My daddy was very good with cattle. He left me some very fine beasts, and they have multiplied. There are many of them now. I shall not have to sell all of them.”

“It is not a good thing to sell cattle,” said Mma Makutsi. “Is there no other way, Mma?”

“I do not see one,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I shall go out to the cattle post and choose the ones to sell.”

“This is a very sad day,” said Mma Makutsi.

“Yes,” said Mma Ramotswe. “It is.” She would have liked to say that it was not, that there was a positive side to this; she was not one to concentrate on the bleak. But where was the positive side in having to dispose of those lovely animals, the legacy of her father, the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of the very cattle that had gathered round his house when in Mochudi he lay in his final illness; had gathered, she thought, to say goodbye to their owner?

But she would have to do it, and so she prepared the next day to go out to the cattle post, a journey of six hours on a very bumpy dirt road. She went in the tiny white van and stopped halfway through the journey to eat a sandwich by the side of the road. It was mid-morning, and getting hotter. A hornbill watched her from the branch of a tree, casting his unnaturally large eye upon her. From another tree, some distance away, a lourie cried out with its distinctive call. She looked up at the sky. What was money? Nothing. A human conceit, so much smaller a thing than love, and friendship, and the pursuit, no matter how pointless, of hope. What did it matter that this money was being thrown away for no good reason? It mattered not at all, she decided.