Page 19 of Orphan Girl's Mountain Men

By the time I'm heading home, my rental car groaning full of groceries and small household appliances, and with the promise of coming back in a few days to pick up my new toy from Joe andget some shooting practice in, the sun is already sinking towards the tree line on the horizon in the west.

This time, I'm a lot more careful on my drive up the mountain, watching out for ditches and any other mishaps on the way. Thankfully, I make it back in one piece, but one thing I promise myself to purchase as soon as I can sell my aunt and uncle's house in Aurora is a nice, rugged truck. Nothing fancy, something with basic four-wheel drive that will keep me safe in the winters here when the driving conditions will no doubt be far from perfect.

I also need someone to teach me how to run a farm. I figure I can stick to grains and vegetables to start with, plus a few hens for eggs. I can always move on to livestock later when I've gotten the hang of things, if I feel the need to. I have some rudimentary knowledge of how to go about things, but I'd rather talk to an expert to make sure my plans are sound.

I tried to talk to Tara about it when I had called her to check if there's been any interest from potential buyers for my aunt and uncle's house, but the only advice she would give me was to not do it and to sell the True Heart Lodge for a fair price and move back to Aurora.

"Farming is difficult." She'd said. "You should come back to Aurora. I'm sure the company you worked for before you went on your travels would take you back."

I resist the urge to roll my eyes. She means well, but I know how pushy she can get so I set her straight, "I'm not coming back to Aurora, Tara. I'm also not doing accounting anymore. The farm thing… I'll need some help, but I'm going to at least try to make it work." She'd sounded doubtful but she hadn't protested anymore.

I turn the last bend and drive up to the cabin, only to find a smart, clean, modern-looking truck parked outside and someone standing on my veranda, presumably waiting for me.He's an older man, tall, slim, striking for his age, with a shock of white hair and a bright smile that I can see even from a mile away. He watches me park and tips his cowboy hat while his other thumb remains tucked in his jeans. The quintessential image of a Virginian cowboy.

"Howdy," he says and I nearly smirk. Yup. Exactly like in the old Western movies.

"Howdy, yourself," I greet him in return, happy to see at least one friendly face on this mountain. "I'm Hailey, nice to meet you."

"It's mighty fine to meet you too, Hailey. I'm Victor Sinclair. I'm your neighbor, I own the Golden Cliff Ranch." He nods towards the south, the other side of my property from the direction of the three men I have already met.

"Oh, well that's great. I'm glad to meet my neighbor." I vaguely recognize his name as one of the people my aunt had mentioned. Perhaps it had been him who'd been taking care of the place during my own and my parents' absence all these years. How serendipitous for him to show up on my veranda like this without me having to hunt him down. "I would love to pick your brain sometime. This is all so new to me, and I need all the advice I can get."

He grins even wider. "Feel free. I hope you don't mind me visiting out of the blue. This place has been abandoned for a few years, and I've always kept my eye on it. So, when I heard that someone had been seen on the property I came over to make sure it wasn't any of those teenagers trespassing or something."

"No, I'm not a trespassing teen," I chuckle as I struggle to carry one of the grocery bags from the backseat. He immediately notices and comes over to my side to take it from my hands. I try to protest but he insists and firmly extracts the bag from my grasp. Southern gentleman.

I take another, lighter bag as I explain. "My parents owned the place, and they passed it down to me. So I guess that makes me the new owner."

As he lifts another bag from the backseat, he eyes the rest of my shopping in the car. "That's some pile of groceries you got yourself there. You planning on staying here long?"

"Forever, hopefully," I quip as I start forward towards the home. "I'm planning on running it as a farm."

"Oh," he says and his tone of voice makes me turn around. His face still looks as pleasant as before, but there's something in his voice that makes me hesitate. I don't mention it though, opening my door in silence and leading the way into the kitchen with the grocery bags.

He comes in after me and we drop the bags on the table. I sense there's something he wants to say but he doesn't know how to say it.

Finally, he opens up, "Forgive me if this is me being too forward and sticking my nose where it don't rightly belong, but can I ask why you would want to do that?"

I shrug. "Why not? My parents bought this place as a vacation home, but I think they always hoped one day to live here permanently and run it as a little family farm. You know, like a little homestead—growing their own produce, maintaining the land, living a rural lifestyle. That was their dream. They loved it here… the mountains, the lake, the forests and the animals. They loved it all. And they had a deep passion for the native American heritage that's embedded all around here, especially the Ute. Though I grew up in Aurora, I've always had that same urge. It's why I left the city and travelled all over the world." I smile. "I was looking for a place I could call 'home' but perhaps it was right in my backyard the whole time."

"That all sounds well and good, but I think you're romanticizing it quite a bit," he says. "The truth is that runninga farm isn't about picking a few cobs of corn, then selling them at a market and going home to a hot bath and dinner. It is damned hard work, and it's a tiring, thankless task that involves knowing a lot of things and being good at all of 'em. Building and maintaining barns and other outbuildings, erecting and maintaining fences, managing tracks and roads through your property, planting, feeding, weeding and finally picking your crops. Storing produce so it lasts and doesn't go off. Then there's managing your limited water supply to irrigate your crops and keep your livestock alive through the summer and clearing the snow from the roof and maintaining your tracks out to the public road in the winter. Taking a chainsaw and felling trees when they threaten to come down on top of your barn. Chopping and stacking firewood for fuel. Storing fodder for your animals. Buying and maintaining equipment like tractors, threshers, generators, and so on.

“It means predicting the weather, knowing who to hire, and dealing with theft and soil changes. It's learning to love the madness and suffering. It took me years to be able to make a success out of my farm and my father had been training me since I was a little boy. I still make mistakes. It's going to be extremely difficult for you to start a farm here from scratch with no experience. I don't suppose you've ever even held a chainsaw, let alone felled a fifty-foot tree with one."

My initial urge is to get defensive, but I take a deep breath and simply nod and listen. He's right. There will be a lot to learn and it is going to be difficult, but I'm still not willing to give up on my dream.

"So, what would you advise me to do?" I ask.

"Well, hon, if I were you, I would try to sell if you can." he says. "It's not worth much, because it's so small—twenty-two acres, right?" I nod. Seems like everyone here knows the size of my property. "And half of that is taken up with the lake and theforest. So you see, no one can do much with it, not commercially. It's not big enough."

"Really?" Perhaps he's right. Perhaps this is all merely a romantic pipe dream. Perhaps I should realize that my ideas for a little family farm here are too unrealistic. Perhaps I should give up. He nods to confirm his words, and he must have seen my face fall at his news, because he looks sad. Then he suddenly brightens up. "I tell you what," he says. "I've had an idea. I could buy it off you, how about that?"

"But I thought you said it was worthless?"

"Well… no I didn't say it was worthless. I mean, all land is worth something, right? It's just not all that valuable is all I'm saying. Especially because of its size. But you see, because I've got about five hundred acres right next door, so your twenty or so acres would be more useful to me than to someone else. That means I can afford to be a little more generous. In fact, I tell you what, in memory of your ma and pa whom I used to know years ago when they came here, I'll give you twenty thousand dollars for it. Why that's nearly a thousand dollars an acre—good money! What do you say?"

It's about ten thousand less than what Dean offered me.

"Thanks," I say. "But I'm not willing to sell right now."

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