His eyes traced the circuit of fencelength to the right of where he lay in the dew and the dust and the August buckhorns, and his boys were shouting above him and to the left crying Call the doctor, Get the gun, and he could not look their direction nor any other but only at that rusty loop of two wires and two bonewhite fenceposts, gnarled limbs from the stand above the hollow (his stand, his hollow), just this one section of a larger fence he would never see finished, did not yet enclose all that was his, only just this pasture, but not that one, nor the other, and not the land he hadn't bought yet. He could not tilt his head to see any of it, and he could not speak nor move anything save his eyes, but he was breathing and he was aware of his blood. Along the barbs to the post, he traced that section of fence down and over and up again, disrupted now by his youngest boy's dirty face which appeared above him huffing with exhaustion, smeared with snot and tears and red from shouting and sunburn, crying We gonna kill it, Pa. Alfie's gonna kill it, and as if the boy had ordered it with a wave of his hand there rang instantly the gunshot, its report rebounding from the stand a quarter mile across the pasture, and the boy jerked his head out of the old man's line of sight such that his (the old man's) vision blurred and then went dim on that rusted loop which marked only part of what was his--another shot--and he felt a rolling flash that collapsed again in chill and he took quick measure of everything he had gained or gathered in his years and came up with the number he well knew: three hundred twenty acres. He got frightfully cold. And now the boy's shape reappeared in the early gray sky, a shadow recognizable to him no longer by light but by his voice, shaky and sucking with a child's despair: He kilt it... Don’t worry none, Pa... We kilt it back.