Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm by Mardi Jo Link Read Free Book Online Page A

Just an oversight, probably. But she watches this group leave the ranch without her, panics when they round a bend into the woods and out of her sight, and it takes some time and some doing but she is determined and eventually she escapes the fence. She doesn’t catch up to the group of riders, though, and the wranglers only notice that she is missing when they return to the barn at the end of the day.
    It had been rainy for several days when Pepper found her way out of that pasture, and the wranglers find her just before dark, stuck in a mud hole in the woods up to her chest. She is in so deep, she has to be pulled out with a tractor. Remarkably, she is unharmed, no broken legs, no broken anything. At least nothing visible.
    The ranch people say they have no idea why a smart old horse like Pepper would do something so nutty. But I know why. As a matter of fact, I know six kinds of lonely reasons why.

3
September 2005
HARVEST MOON
    … Home where I sit in the glider, knowing it needs oil,
    like my own rusty joints. Where I coax blackberry to dogwood and winter
    to harvest, where my table
    is clothed in light. Home where I walk out on the thin
    page of night, without waving or giving myself away,
    and return with my words burning like fire in the grate
.
    —LINDA PARSONS MARION , “Home Fire”
    Out west on real ranches, real ranchers have so much fence to check on, they do it from horseback and call it “riding fence.” They look for rusted-through barbed wire, injured cattle, and wolf tracks.
    I used to fancy myself “walking fence” every week or so when I’d circle the perimeter of our two-acre pasture in my knee-high rubber boots. I’d look for tall weeds breaking the electrical circuit, anything dangerous to horses’ hooves that might be lurking in theground, and broken or damaged fence wire. But there’s no reason for me to make that weekly walk anymore.
    After Major was hit, I did find a spot in the fence where the fence posts were bent almost to the ground but the drooping electric wire was still intact, still “hot.” There were hoofprints gouged deep in the dirt, and looking down at them I could feel his panic.
    I’ve had a few sightings of a skinny, mange-pocked German shepherd–like dog I’ve never seen before trotting in the pasture—sniffing the air, hackles up, sometimes digging or pawing at the ground. I watch him from the fenced-in safety of the garden and know I am looking at a killer. He is the reason Major was in the middle of the road in the middle of the night.
    One day while the kids are at school I sit down next to my empty barn, lean my back against a warm outside wall in the sun, and face the pasture. Luke’s BB gun is across my knees and there’s a golf club in my hand. The gun is to take the dog down and the club is to finish him off. Tender heart that I am, I could do it. I think I might actually
like
doing it.
    But the dog doesn’t show. Not today, and not ever. I leave the golf club handy, just in case.
    Since the tourist ranch’s truck pulling the horse trailer with Pepper’s tail swinging out the back window exited the driveway, I haven’t kept up with any of the regular chores. Walking fence, mucking out the stalls, and grooming the horses used to be my favorite ones; now I don’t have to do them anymore.
    And the other work here feels without purpose. There are weeds in the garden, the grass isn’t mowed, and carrots, squash, and the last of the tomatoes need to be harvested. The builder calls on the phone, but I don’t answer and he leaves a message askingwhen I’d like to meet with him to discuss the unfinished remodeling project. I don’t call him back.
    Instead of working outside, I keep pretty much to the house. Inside the house, I keep pretty much to a flowered chair in front of the picture window. Curled up, legs stiff as an old woman’s on a rainy day, I keep pretty much to myself.
    There is no one to pray to these days, though I revisit the Buddhism