The rancher watched the goats load.
Then looked at the young woman.
“You actually bought those?”
“Yes.”
“For your place?”
“Yes.”
He laughed.
Not loudly.
That almost made it worse.
“I thought the auctioneer was joking.”
“He wasn't.”
“You raising meat goats now?”
“No.”
“Breeding?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“Brush.”
The rancher stared.
“Brush.”
“Yes.”
“With those.”
“Yes.”
He looked into the trailer.
One goat sneezed.
Another tried eating the corner of a paper lot tag.
The rancher shook his head.
“Your father know about this?”
The woman’s expression changed.
Her father was sixty-one.
Eight months earlier, a stroke left his right hand weak and his speech slower.
He could still walk.
Still complain.
Still notice every mistake she made.
But he no longer had the strength to fix them before she saw them.
“Yes.”
she said.
“He knows.”
The rancher raised his eyebrows.
“And he approved?”
“I didn’t ask permission.”
His son looked away to hide a smile.
The older man did not.
“You’re putting a lot of confidence in animals people sold for fourteen dollars.”
The young woman closed the trailer gate.
“No.”
She locked it.
“I’m putting eight hundred dollars into a test because twelve thousand dollars of spraying isn’t currently an option.”
That changed the conversation slightly.
The rancher looked toward her.
“You could sell the south forty.”
“There it is.”
“What?”
“The solution everyone has.”
He frowned.
“That field has been weak for years.”
“It isn't weak.”
“It’s mismanaged.”
His face tightened.
“You saying your father mismanaged it?”
She regretted the wording.
But only slightly.
“My father managed it for cattle.”
“The conditions changed.”
“Now I have to change too.”
The older man looked at the goats again.
“Those things will strip everything.”
“Maybe.”
“Fence won’t hold.”
“We’ll find out.”
“You’ll regret it.”
“Possibly.”
She climbed into her truck.
Before closing the door, she looked down at him.
“But if I’m going to fail, I’d rather spend eight hundred dollars learning than sell forty-seven acres because everybody else already decided what it’s worth.”
His son looked toward her.
The rancher did not answer.
She drove home.
The goats screamed for the first twelve miles.
By mile thirteen, she wondered if the rancher had been right.
By mile sixteen, she considered selling them at the next auction.
By mile twenty, one goat escaped inside the trailer and somehow managed to wedge its front legs into a hay feeder.
She pulled onto the shoulder.
Climbed inside.
Freed it.
Got kicked in the shin.
Swore.
Then laughed alone beside the highway.
This was either the smartest cheap experiment she had ever attempted—
or the beginning of a story everyone at the auction would repeat for years.
The goats arrived at the farm near sunset.