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Owen had come to a well in the Aïr because he wanted to see nomads , and he wanted them to be what the word had meant in his first textbook : people who move because they have not yet learned to stay . The Sahara was doing its part . The man at the well was not . He was Tuareg , and he was watering goats , and the indigo cloth over his face was a tagelmust . Owen recognized it from a photograph . He asked when they would wander on . The man looked at the animals , then at the sky , and named the next pasture . They would go when this ground was tired , if the well there was still good . A cousin had said that it was . The cousin might be wrong . That was the whole uncertainty . It was not an absence of direction . Owen had wanted a stage . First a people roam , then they settle , then they count as modern . He had read that anthropology no longer tells that story , and he had still come looking for the stage with his own eyes . What he had read was plain enough to say at a well : moving with animals is a way of using pasture that is too thin , and too seasonal , for a herd to stay in one place . It is a plan that fits a dry country . It is not a childhood the world is supposed to outgrow . He noticed the phone when the man took it out to ask about the farther well . For a moment Owen was grateful , because a phone would let him keep the old idea in a new sentence : the nomads are ending , the signal has arrived . The man put the phone away and went back to the goats . The call had not settled him . It had saved him a walk if the water was gone . A tool that answers a question about a well is still a tool about a well . Some Tuareg families live in towns now . Owen had seen that on the way in , and he had treated it as the real future , with this well as a leftover . The man did not argue the point . He had not offered himself as a remnant . He had offered a condition : this pasture , then the next , if the water holds . Families who no longer move are a fact . They are not a proof that the families who do move are late . The goats finished . Nobody packed a camp for the visitor . Owen closed the notebook he had opened on the word wander . The plan had been the water , and it did not need him to witness it . He let that stand .
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