Hazard Ranch

by Joan Johnston

  Now Harry could see, with the clarity of twenty-twenty hindsight, that she’d hurt herself even more than her parents by the choices she’d made. But the method of dealing with her parents’ manipulation, which she’d started as a child and continued as a teenager, she’d found impossible to reverse as an adult. Until now. At twenty-six she finally had the perfect opportunity to break the pattern of failure she’d pursued for a lifetime. She only hoped she hadn’t waited too long.

  Harry was certain she could manage her great-uncle Cyrus’s sheep ranch. She was certain she could do anything she set her brilliant mind to do. After all, it had taken brilliance to fail as magnificently, and selectively, as she had all these years. So now, when she was determined to succeed at last, she’d wanted her family’s support. It was clear she wasn’t going to get it. And she could hardly blame them for it. She was merely reaping what she had so carefully sowed.

  Harry had a momentary qualm when she wondered whether they might be right. Maybe she was biting off more than she could chew. After all, what did she know about sheep or sheep ranching? Then her chin tilted up and she clenched her hands in her lap under the table. They were wrong. She wouldn’t fail. She could learn what she didn’t know. And she would succeed.

  Harriet Elizabeth Alistair was convinced in her heart that she wasn’t a failure. Surely, once she made up her mind to stop failing, she could. Once she was doing something she had chosen for herself, she was bound to succeed. She would show them all. She wasn’t what they thought her—someone who had to be watched and protected from herself and the cold, cruel world around her. Rather, she was a woman with hopes and dreams, none of which she’d been allowed—or rather, allowed herself—to pursue.

  Like a pioneer of old, Harry wanted to go west to build a new life. She was prepared for hard work, for frigid winter mornings and searing summer days. She welcomed the opportunity to build her fortune with the sweat of her brow and the labor of her back. Harry couldn’t expect her family to understand why she wanted to try to make it on her own in a cold, smelly, faraway place where she would have to indulge in manual labor. She had something to prove to herself. This venture was the Boston Tea Party and the Alamo and Custer’s Last Stand all rolled into one. In the short run she might lose a few battles, but she was determined to win the war.

  At last Harry broke the awesome silence that had descended on the dinner table. “Nothing you’ve said has changed my mind,” she told her family. “I’ll be leaving at the end of the week.”

  Nothing her family said the following week, and they’d said quite a lot, had dissuaded Harry from the course she’d set for herself. She’d been delighted to find, when she arrived a week later in Big Timber, the town closest to great-uncle Cyrus’s ranch, that at least she hadn’t been deceived about the beauty of the mountains in southwestern Montana. The Crazy Mountains provided a striking vista to the north, while the majestic, snow-capped Absarokas greeted her to the south each morning. But they were the only redeeming feature in an otherwise daunting locale.

  The Boulder River Valley was a desolate place in late February. The cottonwoods that lined the Boulder River, which meandered the length of the valley, were stripped bare of leaves. And the grass, what wasn’t covered by patches of drifted snow, was a ghastly straw-yellow. All that might have been bearable if only she hadn’t found such utter decay when she arrived at great-uncle Cyrus’s ranch.

  Her first look at the property she’d inherited had been quite a shock. Harry had been tempted to turn tail and run back to Williamsburg. But something—perhaps the beauty of the mountains, but more likely the thought of facing her family if she gave up without even trying—had kept her from giving John Wilkinson the word to sell. She would never go home until she could do so with her head held high, the owner and manager of a prosperous sheep ranch.

  Harry had discovered dozens of reasons to question her decision ever since she’d moved to Montana, not the least of which was the meeting today with her nearest neighbor. Nathan Hazard hadn’t exactly fulfilled her expectations of the typical western hero. A more provoking, irritating, exasperating man she had never known! Whether he admitted it or not, it had been a pretty sneaky thing to do, helping her so generously with the difficult lambing when he knew all along he was only softening her up so that he could make an offer on her land.

  Thoughts of the difficult birthing reminded her that she still had to dispose of the dead lamb. Harry knew she ought to bury it, but the ground was frozen. She couldn’t imagine burning it. And she couldn’t bear the thought of taking the poor dead lamb somewhere up into the foothills and leaving it among the juniper and jack pine for nature’s scavengers to find. None of the brochures she’d read discussed this particular problem. Harry knew there must be some procedures the local ranchers followed. Surely they also had deaths at lambing time. But she’d dig a hole in the frozen ground with her fingernails before she asked Nathan Hazard what to do.

  For now Harry decided to move the dead lamb behind the barn and cover it with a tarp. As long as the weather stayed cold, the body wouldn’t decay. When she could spare the time, she would take a trip into Big Timber and strike up a conversation with Slim Harley at the feed store. Somehow she would casually bring up the subject of dead lambs in the conversation and get the answers she needed. Harry’s lips twisted wryly. Western conversations certainly tended to have a grittier tone than those in the East.

  Harry couldn’t put off what had to be done. She slipped her vest back on, pulled her cap down on her head and stepped back into her galoshes. A quick search turned up some leather work gloves in the drawer beside the sink. A minute later she was headed back out to the sheep pens.

  Harry actually shuddered when she picked up the dead lamb. It had stiffened in death. It was also heavier than she’d expected, so she had to hold it close to her chest in order to carry it. Despite everything Harry had read about not getting emotionally involved, she was unable to keep from mourning the animal’s death. It seemed like such a waste. Although, if the lamb had lived it would have gone to market, where it would eventually have become lamb chops on some Eastern dinner table.

  Maybe she ought to call Nathan Hazard and take him up on his offer, after all.

  Before Harry had a chance to indulge her bout of maudlin conjecture she heard another sheep baaing in distress.

  Not again!

  Harry raced for the sheep pens where she had separated the ewes that were ready to deliver. Instead she discovered a sheep had already given birth to a lamb. While she watched, it birthed a twin. Harry had learned from her extensive reading that her sheep had been genetically bred so they bore twins, thus doubling the lamb crop. But to her it was a unique happening. She stopped and leaned against the pen and smiled with joy at having witnessed such a miraculous event.

  Then she realized she had work to do. The cords had to be cut and dipped in iodine. And the ewe and her lambs had to be moved into a jug, a small pen separate from the other sheep, for two or three days until the lambs had bonded with their mothers and gotten a little stronger.

  Harry had read that lambing required constant attention from a rancher, but she hadn’t understood that to mean she would get no sleep, no respite. For the rest of the night she never had a chance to leave the sheep barn, as the ewes dropped twin lambs that lived or died depending on the whims of fate. The stack under the tarp beside her barn got higher.

  If Harry had found a spare second, she would have swallowed her pride and called Nathan Hazard for help. But by the time she got a break near dawn, the worst seemed to be over. Harry had stood midwife to the delivery of forty-seven lambs. Forty-three were still alive.

  She dragged herself into the house and only then realized she’d forgotten about the orphan lamb in her kitchen. He was bleating pitifully from hunger. Despite her fatigue, Harry took the time to fix the lamb a bottle. She fell asleep sitting on the wooden-plank floor with her back against the wooden-plank wall, with the hungry lamb in her lap sucking a
t a nippled Coke bottle full of milk replacer.

  That was how Nathan Hazard found her the following morning at dawn.

  * * *

  Nathan had lambing of his own going on, but unlike Harriet Alistair, he had several hired hands to help with the work. When suppertime arrived, he left the sheep barn and came inside to a hot meal that Katoya, the elderly Blackfoot Indian woman who was his housekeeper, had ready and waiting for him.

  Katoya had mysteriously arrived on the Hazard doorstep on the day Nathan’s mother had died, as though by some prearranged promise, to take her place in the household. Nathan had been sixteen at the time. No explanation had ever been forthcoming as to why the Blackfoot woman had come. And despite Nathan’s efforts in later years to ease the older woman’s chores, Katoya still worked every day from dawn to dusk with apparent tirelessness, making Nathan’s house a home.

  As Nathan sat down at the kitchen table, he wondered whether Harriet Alistair had found anything worth eating in her bare cupboards. The fact he should find himself worrying about an Alistair, even if it was a woman, made him frown.

  “Were you able to buy the land?” Katoya asked as she poured coffee into his cup.

  Nathan had learned better than to try to keep secrets from the old Indian woman. “Harry Alistair wouldn’t sell,” he admitted brusquely.

  The diminutive Blackfoot woman merely nodded. “So the feud will go on.” She seated herself in a rocker in the kitchen that was positioned to get the most heat from the old-fashioned wood stove.

  Nathan grimaced. “Yeah.”

  “Is it so important to own the land?”

  Nathan turned to face her and saw skin stretched tight with age over high, wide cheekbones and black hair threaded with silver in two braids over her shoulders. He suddenly wondered how old she was. Certainly she had clung to the old Blackfoot ways. “It must be the Indian in you,” he said at last, “that doesn’t feel the same need as I do to possess land.”

  Katoya looked back at him with eyes that were a deep black well of wisdom. “The Indian knows what the white man has never learned. You cannot own the land. You can only use it for so long as you walk the earth.”

  Katoya started the rocker moving, and its creak made a familiar, comforting sound as Nathan ate the hot lamb stew she’d prepared for him.

  Nathan had to admit there was a lot to be said for the old woman’s argument. Why was he so determined to own that piece of Alistair land? After all, when he was gone, who would know or care? Maybe he could have accepted Katoya’s point of view if he hadn’t met Harry Alistair first. Now he couldn’t leave things the way they stood. That piece of land smack in the middle of his spread had always been a burr under the saddle. He didn’t intend to stop bucking until the situation was remedied.

  Nathan refilled his own coffee cup to keep the old woman from having to get up again, then settled down into the kitchen chair with his legs stretched out toward the stove. Because he respected Katoya’s advice, Nathan found himself explaining the situation. “The Harry Alistair who inherited the land from Cyrus turned out to be a woman, Harry-et Alistair. She’s greener than buffalo grass in spring and doesn’t know a thing about sheep that hasn’t come out of an extension service bulletin. Harry-et Alistair hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of making a go of Cyrus’s place. But I never saw a woman so determined, so stubborn….”

  “You admire her,” Katoya said.

  “I don’t…Yes, I do,” he admitted with a disbelieving shake of his head. Nathan kept his face averted as he continued, “But I can’t imagine why. She’s setting herself up for a fall. I just hate to see her have to take it.”

  “We always have choices. Is there truly nothing that can be done?”

  “Are you suggesting I offer to help her out?” Nathan demanded incredulously. “Because I won’t. I’m not going to volunteer a shoulder to cry on, let alone one to carry a yoke. I’ve learned my lessons well,” he said bitterly. “I’m not going to let that woman get under my skin.”

  “Perhaps it is too late. Perhaps you already care for her. Perhaps you will have no choice in the matter.”

  Nathan’s jaw flexed as he ground his teeth. The old woman was more perceptive than was comfortable. How could he explain to her the feeling of possessiveness, of protectiveness that had arisen the moment he’d seen Harry-et Alistair. He didn’t understand it himself. Hell, yes, he already cared about Harry-et Alistair. And that worried the dickens out of him. What if he succumbed to her allure? What if he ended up getting involved with her, deeply, emotionally involved with her, and it turned out she needed more than he could give? He knew what it meant to have someone solely dependent upon him, to have someone rely upon him for everything, and to know that no matter how much he did it wouldn’t be enough. Nathan couldn’t stand the pain of that kind of relationship again.

  “You must face the truth,” Katoya said. “What will be must be.”

  The old woman’s philosophy was simple but irrefutable. “All right,” Nathan said. “I’ll go see her again tomorrow morning. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to get involved in her life.”

  Nathan repeated that litany until he fell asleep, where he dreamed of a woman with freckles and braids and bibbed overalls who kissed with a passion that had made his pulse race and his body throb. He woke up hard and hungry. He didn’t shave, didn’t eat, simply pulled on jeans, boots, shirt, hat and coat and slammed out the door.

  When he arrived at the Alistair place, it was deathly quiet. There was no smoke coming from the stone chimney, no sounds from the barn, or from the tiny, dilapidated cabin.

  Something’s wrong.

  Nathan thrust the pickup truck door open and hit the ground running for the cabin. His heart was in his throat, his breath hard to catch because his chest was constricted.

  Let her be all right, he prayed. I promise I’ll help if only she’s all right.

  The kitchen door not only wasn’t locked, it wasn’t even closed. Nathan shoved it open and roared at the top of his voice, “Harry-et! Are you in here? Harry-et!”

  That was when he saw her. She was sitting on the floor in the corner with a lamb clutched to her chest, her eyes wide with terror at the sight of him. He was so relieved, and so angry that she’d frightened him for nothing, that he raced over, grabbed her by the shoulders and hauled her to her feet.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing, leaving the back door standing wide open? You’ll catch your death of cold,” he yelled, giving her shoulders a shake to make his point. “Of all the stupid, idiotic, greenhorn—”

  And then it dawned on him what he was doing, and he let her go as abruptly as he’d grabbed her. She backed up to the wall and stood there, staring at him.

  Harry Alistair had a death grip on the lamb in her arms. There were dark circles under her eyes, which were wide and liquid with tears that hadn’t yet spilled. Her whole body was trembling with fatigue and the aftereffects of the shaking Nathan had given her. Her mouth was working but the words weren’t coming out in much more than a whisper.

  Nathan leaned closer to hear what she was trying to say.

  “Get out,” she rasped. And then, stronger, “Get out of my house.”

  Nathan felt his heart miss a thump. “I’m sorry. Look, I only came over—”

  Her chin came up. “I don’t care why you came. I want you to leave. And don’t come back.”

  Nathan’s lips pressed flat. What will be must be. It was just as well things had turned out this way. It would have been a mistake to try to help her, anyway. But there was a part of him that died inside at the thought of not seeing her again. He wanted her. More than he’d ever wanted a woman in his life. But she was all wrong for him. She needed the kind of caretaking he’d sworn he was through with forever.

  It took every bit of grit he had to turn on his booted heel and walk out of the room. And out of her life.

  CHAPTER 3

  What is accepted dress-for-success garb for country women? />
  Answer: Coveralls, scabby work shoes, holey hat and shredded gloves.

  I am not a failure. I can do anything I set my mind to do. I will succeed.

  Over the next two months there were many times when Harry wanted to give up. Often, it was only the repetition of those three sentences that kept her going. For, no matter how hard she tried, things always went awry. She had been forced to learn some hard lessons and learn them fast.

  About a week after the majority of the lambs had been born, most of them got sick. Harry called in the vet, who diagnosed lamb scours and prescribed antibiotics. Despite her efforts, a dozen more lambs died. She stacked them under the tarp beside the barn.

  Early on the lambs had to have their tails docked, and the ram lambs, except those valuable enough to be sires, had to be castrated. Several of the older brochures described cutting off the lamb tails with a knife and searing the stump with a hot iron. Castration was described even more graphically. Faced with such onerous chores, Harry had known she would never make it as a sheepman.

  At her lowest moment a brochure describing a more modern technique for docking and castration mysteriously arrived in her mailbox. An “elastrator” and rubber bands were placed on the appropriate extremities, which wasted away and dropped off on their own within two to three weeks. She found the process unpleasant, time-consuming work. But with the information provided in the timely brochure, she’d succeeded when she might have given up.

  Unfortunately Harry also lost several ewes during delivery and found herself with more orphan lambs, which she had learned were called bums, that had to be fed with milk replacer. Bottle-feeding lambs turned out to be surprisingly expensive, and she had to dip into the meager financial reserves Cyrus had left in the bank. She would have run out of money except Harley’s Feed Store had a sale on milk replacer. That had seemed a little odd to Harry, but a blushing Slim had assured her that he’d ordered too much replacer, and if he didn’t sell it cheap, it was just going to sit on the shelf for another year. Cyrus’s money had gone farther than she’d dared to hope.