The first person to laugh was the auctioneer.
Not cruelly at first.
At least, that was what the young farmer told herself.
He had probably seen stranger purchases made by desperate people on bad afternoons.
Still, when she lifted her numbered card for the third time and bought another pen of skinny, mixed-breed goats nobody else seemed to want, the auctioneer looked down over his reading glasses and said into the microphone,
“Ma’am, you starting a goat rescue or planning to feed every coyote in the county?”
The livestock barn erupted in laughter.
She kept her card raised.
“Sold,” the auctioneer said. “Fourteen dollars and fifty cents a head.”
The gate opened.
Another group of undersized goats stumbled into the holding alley.
Some had black coats.
Some were white.
Several were brown with dark stripes along their backs.
One little doe had mismatched ears.
Another had a horn broken near the base.
A spotted wether stood so narrow through the hips that the farmer could almost count his ribs from twenty feet away.
The young woman looked at them carefully.
Not lovingly.
Not romantically.
Practically.
Eyes clear.
Feet decent.
Teeth mostly sound.
Thin, yes.
Worthless?
That remained to be seen.
Her name was not important to the men laughing from the bleachers.
To them she was simply the twenty-eight-year-old woman trying to keep the old Turner place alive after her father’s stroke had forced him out of daily work.
Forty-seven acres of pasture.
Twelve cows.
An aging stock trailer.
One tractor old enough that its manufacturer had stopped making several of the parts she regularly needed.
And now—
forty-two goats she had purchased for less than what several neighboring ranchers spent on diesel in a week.
The man sitting two rows behind her leaned toward his friend.
“She lost her mind.”
The friend shook his head.
“She’ll spend more fixing fences than those things are worth.”
Another rancher added,
“Coyotes are going to eat better than we do.”
The young woman heard all three.
She did not turn around.
She was busy doing arithmetic.
Forty-two animals.
Fourteen dollars and fifty cents each.
Six hundred nine dollars.
Add auction commission.
Add hauling.
Add wormer.
Add minerals.
Still under eight hundred.
If they failed, she would lose money she absolutely could not afford to lose.
If they worked—
she might save the forty-seven acres without writing a five-figure check for brush control she could afford even less.
That was the part nobody at the auction knew.
Three weeks earlier, a county range specialist had walked the pasture with her and crouched beside a waist-high stand of invasive broadleaf plants growing along the southern slope.
He had pulled one by the root.
Then another.