The Great Goat Election

In the village of Ccollpa Alta, high in the hills above the Vilcanota river, a morning's bus ride from Cusco, there were three important things.

The first was the potatoes. Ccollpa Alta grew more kinds of potato than Mara could count, and Mara could count very high. Yellow ones and purple ones, long thin ones like fingers and round lumpy ones like grandfathers' knees.

The second was the mountain. Far off, past the brown hills and the green terraces, past the valley and the next valley, there was a mountain so white and so huge that it looked painted on the sky. Apu Ausangate. On clear mornings, it seemed close enough to touch.

The third important thing was the bridge.

For as long as anyone could remember, the children of Ccollpa Alta had crossed the stream to school by jumping. There were stepping stones, nine of them, flat and grey and slippery. In the dry season, the stream was a trickle, and jumping was easy. In the rainy season, the stream became a brown, roaring, rock-rolling monster, and the stones disappeared, and the children of Ccollpa Alta stayed home, or went the long way round, which took two hours, or jumped anyway, which made their grandmothers shout.

But this year, the village had built a bridge.

It had taken all of the dry season. Everybody had helped. The ropes for the railings were twisted from grass, the old way, the way the Inca had made bridges. Even the children had carried stones. And now it stood across the stream, new and pale and smelling of wood, with a gate of carved eucalyptus at each end, waiting to be opened.

"The inauguration," said Mayor Leoncio Huamán, from the steps of the village hall on Sunday morning, to everyone in the plaza, "will be in one week."

Everybody cheered. The mayor waited for them to stop. He was a round man with a magnificent moustache, and he liked speeches the way Mamá Saturnina's goat liked laundry.

"And at the inauguration," he went on, "the first to cross the bridge will be its Guardian. Its symbol. Its protector. Its face, painted on the sign at the gate, for all the years to come." He raised one finger. "An animal of Ccollpa Alta."

There was a buzz of interest.

"And who will choose this Guardian?" said the mayor. "You will! We will have an election!" He pointed with a flourish to a table at the bottom of the steps. On it stood a row of empty clay jars, and beside them, a sack of dried beans. "Every person in Ccollpa Alta, young and old, will have one bean. On Sunday next, you will drop your bean into the jar of the animal you choose. The jar with the most beans wins."

Mara looked at the jars, and the beans, and then up at the mayor, who was smiling a very satisfied smile.

Mamá Saturnina was knitting. She was always knitting. She knitted in church when she thought nobody was looking. Her needles clicked like a clock.

They clicked faster now.

"An election," she muttered. "For an animal. With beans." She looked at the mayor over her spectacles. "I know exactly which animal he is thinking of. He has been brushing it all week."

"Which animal?" said Mara.

Mamá Saturnina did not answer. She only clicked her needles and looked towards the side of the village hall, where something white was standing very still in the shade.

"I am pleased to say," said the mayor, "that we already have our first candidate."

He stepped aside, and from the shade of the village hall, led by the mayor's nephew Rufino on a red rope, came Doña Perlita.

The whole plaza said "Ohhh."

Doña Perlita was an alpaca, and she was the most beautiful animal in Ccollpa Alta, possibly in the whole of the Vilcanota valley. She was white, perfectly white, the white of new snow on Ausangate. Her wool had been brushed until it stood out around her like a cloud. She had long eyelashes and red tassels on her ears, and she walked down the steps as if she found steps slightly boring. At the bottom, she stopped, and looked out over the crowd, and hummed, softly, the way alpacas do.

"Doña Perlita," said the mayor, with enormous pride, "for Guardian of the Bridge!"

Everybody clapped. Rufino, who was sixteen and wore sunglasses even when it was cloudy, set a clay jar in front of Perlita with a sign on it, in red paint: PERLITA. Then he looked round the plaza, smirking.

"Any other candidates?" he said. "No? Then I suppose..."

That was when the goat arrived.

Mara heard it before Mara saw it: a clatter of hooves on stone, a shriek from the woman who sold bread, a crash of something falling over, and then, from between the legs of the crowd, came a small, scruffy, brown-and-white billy goat with a beard like a paintbrush and one horn that curled up and one horn that curled sideways, as if it had changed its mind halfway.

He had a loaf of bread in his mouth. And a sock on his crooked horn.

He trotted straight through the middle of the plaza, past Rufino, past Perlita, up to the table of clay jars, and stopped. He looked at the jars. He looked at the sack of beans. Then he put his front hooves up on the table, knocked over the jar that said PERLITA, and climbed inside the empty jar beside it, bread and all, so that only his head stuck out, chewing.

There was a long silence.

"Fermín!" said Mamá Saturnina, in a voice like thunder.

"Is this," said the mayor slowly, "a candidate?"

And Mara, before Mara could stop her mouth from moving, heard her own voice say, loud and clear across the plaza:

"Yes. Yes, he is."