“Dodi, Dodi!” Giza nudges me awake. “The wall is coming down.”  

I open my eyes, slowly adjusting them to dawn. The sun is making its way out of the valley’s horizon, dimming the glimmer of the remaining stars in today’s sky.

“It’s too early, let me sleep a little longer.” 

“Dodi, did you hear what I just said? The wall,” she pauses, “is falling!” 

I push myself off the ground. One of my legs had fallen asleep. I move it back and forth until I regain sensation. In the close distance, behind the shrubs where we’d taken shelter, I see a man on a bulldozer, pushing its fork into blocks of the wall.  

The wall forced itself into my reality. Giza and I adjusted our movements around it, around this new city we were forced into. We were both born in the valley, each in our own gazelle herd. We’d grown up there. We raced in its terrains, we learned to fetch food, take shelter. In this new town we found ourselves in, the city on the hill, buildings stretched as far as the horizon, changing the landscape of the hills. Where there’d been pathways carved by elements, they built asphalt roads. Terraced fields were planted with trees not native to the land. Erzals, the round stone huts farmers built to rest, had been torn down to make way for identical houses with red roofs. The valley’s main water source, the spring, was rerouted to feed their synthetic lakes. We never went into the city—we stayed around the water and between the sturdy oaks, olive and fig trees, and mallow, near the landmarks familiar to us. Once it was built, they wrapped the wall around it. To protect it? To protect the valley from it? We didn’t know. At first, we’d used a small gap in the wall to go in and out of our valley. Eventually, the gap was filled with more concrete blocks and we lost access to our home.   

“I don’t understand,” I tell Giza.  

“Me neither.” 

We both watch as blocks of concrete slowly fall into rubble. The smell of dust is suffocating. Giza flicks her tail and stealthily begins to walk past the shrubs. I jump in front of her, blocking her way. 

“What if he’s dangerous?” Giza isn’t stupid. She knows what humans are capable of, running us over with their cars, hunting us, chasing us for fun. 

“I don’t think whoever’s bringing this structure down can be evil. We’ll be okay.” 

Arguing with Giza is oftentimes pointless, and I trust her instincts. I let her pass and I follow. We tread lightly, cautious not to step on anything that may snap. We simultaneously register the noise of the bulldozer as we approach it and realize there’s no need to be quiet. We stop behind a cactus some twenty steps from the man and his bulldozer. Its noise ruins the morning. I think the sun protests. I feel it rise faster to expose the clamor in the scape. Two worms burrow out of the soil to warm under its rays. 

I came into contact with the wall a few springs ago. Mama and I had made our annual trek from the central valley to the eastern valley, where water streams were abundant. We spent our springs and summers there, and migrated back to the central valley during autumn and winter. We knew to make the trek when the winter rain carpeted the land with a bright green sown with red poppies and yellow daisies. We’d never seen it, but we knew that atop the hill was a spring that fed the entire eastern valley. When we arrived east that year, though, there was no water.  

“We have to go to the source,” I said to Mama. 

“This is the source,” Mama said, moving her left hoof into the earth, exposing a fresh shade of brown in the soil. “We should wait a few days. Water will come.” She believed it would.  

“What if it doesn’t?” I asked, regretting the question immediately. Mama did not appreciate it when I questioned our ways.  

“Dodi,” she shook her head slowly. “You must have faith. This is the stream our ancestors migrated to every year. They survived the scorching summers because water always flowed into the valley.” 

Mama came to me two weeks later, on the thirteenth waterless night.  

“We leave with the sun.” She slipped next to me in our spot between the shrubs, and I rested my head on her back.  

I feel the man’s gaze move toward me and Giza. He turns off his bulldozer and jumps to the ground. He walks a little hunched, slow. Giza and I shift back. He stops, tilts his head down, and holds up his hands, palms out, as if to say It’s okay. Giza puts her head down to say It’s okay, too. The man is a step away from us. He brings his fingertips under the tip of my nose. I breathe heavy. I’m not a cat, I want to tell him. That’s not how we build trust. 

“It’s okay,” he finally says. “I’m not here to hurt you.” 

I look up at him, he’s slightly taller than me. He looks tired. He must have been working all night.  

“Gazelle,” he says, this time I think to himself. “I’ve never seen one this close.” 

Giza takes a step toward him and brushes her face against his arm. He strokes her head. He’s a little hesitant about approaching me, so I follow Giza’s lead and he scratches between my eyes with his thumb. The man must have a cat. I want to laugh, but I can tell he’s trying his best to reassure us that it’s safe. 

Dust particles settle onto the ground, no longer reflecting the sun in their billow. I notice the horizon. I walk toward the man’s bulldozer, Giza and the man follow. Behind their own plumes of dust, I see at least ten more bulldozers, ten more people, working against the divide. I look back to the man, and I see him smiling.  

“We have our land back,” he tells me, and I think he knows I understand. 

When Mama and I gave up on water coming down the valley, we followed the dried stream bed up the hill. The trek had made Mama tired, her old body dehydrated. We’d been able to eat from the green the land provided, but without water, the journey proved difficult for both of us. I found myself having to constantly slow down so I could keep up with Mama’s pace. Her hooves sank into the earth with every step she took.

When we made it to the top, we didn’t find water. We found the wall. Mama broke down and cried, letting out a screech that she’d been holding the entire trip. The structure stretched across the hill like a snake with no head or tail in sight. I ran closer to it and tried to dig my hoof under it, but there was no digging beneath this wall. I jumped into it, naive for thinking it would budge. I fell back and looked at Mama and then to the clear blue sky, now sliced in half by this structure. I bellowed.

“Dodi, is that you?” 

“Giza?” I recognized her voice. I hadn’t seen Giza since last year. Her herd didn’t travel like ours, they remained east year-round. “Giza, what is this? Where is the spring?” 

“It’s been here since you left for the central valley last year. We noticed the land drying up, so we moved up the hill.”  

“Is there a way across the wall from here?” In the distance I thought I could hear water crashing onto a surface. I could almost taste it. Feel it splash on my fur.  

“Yes, but it’s been redirected to a city they’ve built. There’s an opening in the wall.”  

“What city?” 

“Focus! There’s a small gap in the wall. It’s quite the way around. Keep running east. You’ll be here in a day, maybe half a day. I know how fast you run.” Giza didn’t know Mama was with me.  

I looked at Mama.  

“Should we stop and break before we continue, Mama?” 

“I think I should, Dodi.” 

“No,” I understood what she was doing. “Together, Mama.”  

She shook her head and sat down. 

“It’s my time.”   

I walked toward a nearby mulberry tree. I stood on my back legs and reached for as many leaves and berries as my mouth could hold. I left them by Mama’s side.  

“Go,” she said. “So you can get there before nightfall.” 

I brought my nose to hers one last time, letting out a silent cry.  

I left Mama to die that day. Almost in the same spot of the wall that the man had just torn down.  

The man says he will be back at night. It’s too hot to work during the day. When he leaves, Giza and I walk along a belt of rubble. We see our valley for the first time in many seasons. The sun paints it orange. The few erzals that withstood the seasons turn a beautiful gold. Mushrooms have unfolded in the soil. The sun meets their caps and reveals their pores. The olive trees are mostly bare from the drought, but their roots still curve into the soil. A fly lands on my face, I shake it off. A breeze brushes through the Syrian thistles scattered over the valley. I lay my head on Giza’s neck. The fly comes back and lands on the white stripe of fur between her eyes. She jumps, pushing me to the ground. She falls next to me. We laugh.   

The man returns that night. Giza and I can’t stand the clatter of the machines, so we walk deeper into the forest next to the city. We watch from a distance. The bulldozers collect the gray concrete and load it into a big container. I wonder where they are taking it. Can it go back to its source, back to the earth?  

A while later, the man gets off the bulldozer and picks up an ax. He walks in our direction. I doubt he is able to see us, but I feel my hooves tense into the soil nonetheless. He squats and feels for something in the ground. He calls one of the people loading the concrete. A woman runs toward him. He points to the spot he’d just felt. The woman nods. They hold the ax together and swing into the soil. Once. Twice. The third time, water gushes out of a pipe. The man and woman kneel next to the flowing water and wiggle the pipe out of the soil. They pull it out. The water curves into the opposite direction, back into our valley. The man and woman slap their hands together. Giza and I run toward the source. The man sees us and smiles. 

“You can go back,” he screams over the slosh of the water. “We can go back.”   

Giza and I run down the valley, along the parched stream beds. We stop and watch water trickle to fill the dry cracks in the earth. I see the moisture turn the soil a darker brown. With my hoof, I press the earth closed. I feel the land dampen. The stream returns.  

“Do you think we can learn to live here again?” Giza asks me, pushing her nose into the water. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I bump my horns against hers. “This is our home.” 

She blows air into the water and splashes my face. I laugh and run down the valley. We race against the water.  

We return to ourselves.