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his nose like the bull did, and stretched his neck forward. They stood like this for a while, laughing silently into each other’s faces.
    Henry slipped his hand between the bars and scratched the bull’s chin. A deep purr resounded from within the animal, and it closed its eyes gently. He isn’t bad, Henry thought. He’s not evil; he’s just a little angry being fenced in like this. He’s not bad, not bad at all. Just lonely. He just needs a friend.
    Henry stepped up onto the fence and embraced the bull’s head, while the bull tried to eat Henry’s sweater with his coarse tongue.
    “Good bull,” Henry whispered. “Good bull.”
    He scratched the bull behind the ears, dug his thick fingers into the curls on his forehead. And the bull purred like a kitten.
    Henry wanted to give him a name. He remembered that Reverend Oswald had talked about a great flood the other day, about Noah’s ark and all the animals. Noah! That was a good name.
    Noah purred and pressed himself against the creaking fence, which closed him in on all sides. Carefully, Henry climbed into his stall, squeezing himself into a corner, and stood eye to eye with the bull. Noah sniffed his clothes and pressed his head against Henry’s chest. Henry gasped for breath and saw red, but he wasn’t going to give up. He embraced the large head and squeezed tightly like he was trying to wring Noah’s neck. But Henry knew full well that he wasn’t strong enough to do that. And Noah knew it as well; he rolled his eyes and turned his head to the side, with a hint of a grin around his mouth. It was just a little game between two friends, two kindred spirits who had found each other in the loneliness of the world.
    When Henry heard footsteps on the gravel outside at dawn, he climbed back over the fence and waited. It was the last day Emily would be helping him milk. She arrived with a smile and a bucket full of hot water. He would be doing all the milking this morning; she said she would only be observing, making sure he was comfortable being left on his own in the cowshed from now on.
    He washed Old Red’s udders, put grease on the teats, and started milking. Emily looked around and noticed he had scraped all the stalls clean.
    “They’re so happy when their stalls are clean and dry,” she said. “And they give more milk when they’re happy,” she added.
    Henry wondered how to tell her that the bull wasn’t really that dangerous, that he was just miserable and lonely. But he had difficulty forming the sentence in his mind, a sentence she would understand. Perhaps it would be best not to tell her, not just yet. Maybe she wouldn’t understand, being so afraid of the bull and all.
    So he said nothing.
    Emily asked him how he felt these days, if everything was all right, if he was happy with his room. He nodded and grunted a sort-of yes, deep in his throat.
    “I know this place can be lonely at times,” she said, staring out of the small window. “Isolated, perhaps, especially in winter. But the summers here are lovely, you’ll see.”
    They were both silent for a while.
    Henry poured the first bucket into a container, which floated in a tank full of cold water, and moved the milking stool next to Little Gray.
    With Emily around, Henry never felt pressured; it was always relaxing.
    “Ages ago, back in pagan times, there were green meadows where the lava fields are today,” Emily said in a low voice, as if talking to herself.
    “An eruption cleared the entire area overnight. The lava ran down the mountains in the north, flowed over the fields, and surrounded the knoll where the old farmhouse stood.”
    For a moment Henry feared that she was about to give him the same lecture he’d been forced to listen to on the bus. But as she continued speaking in her soft voice, her words had a very different effect on him than he had expected.
    She told him how the burning lava had rushed over the outbuildings and chased the sheep and the people, who fled toward