Last Chance Llama Ranch by Hilary Fields Page B

straight ahead? Heaven.
    Even the clouds, gold-limned at the edges by the climbing sun, couldn’t steal the thunder of the vermillion sandstone bluffs and distant blue-purple mountains that created an abrupt and magnificent stop for the eye. It was like every western movie come to life, like God had painted his wisdom in stone and sand with the brush of time, wind, and water. Striations of cream, salmon, rust, and bloodred were set off by sagebrush and the occasional piñon, the whole flat-topped, with tall spires calved off the main mesa to stand like natural chimneys against the ever-blue sky.
    The creak of the screen door told Merry her hostess was joining her.
    “ Damn , Dolly.”
    “I know.” There was an understandable helping of smugness in the older woman’s voice. “I get to grouching over my lot in life, I come out here and I shaddup.”
    Though she was loath to turn away from the stunning view, Merry angled her rocking chair for a better view of her host, who had settled into the seat to Merry’s right. “Tell me about it,” she invited. “How did you get started running the ranch?”
    So Dolly told.
    “My husband John and I bought the Last Chance about eight years back,” she began, “thinking we’d run some cattle or just raise horses. John had some money from the oil fields, and I was ready as hell to leave Texas—I’m from Alamogordo, New Mexico, originally, and Texans ain’t exactly our bosom buddies—so we came out here, figuring to spend our golden years. Only the years weren’t so golden. Once we were out here in the ass end of Eden, John not off working and me with barely anyone to talk to, we started getting on each other’s nerves. Imagine,” she marveled, “a man who won’t so much as read a Stephen King novel to pass the time. Pretty soon, he was passing the time with a senorita from the village, and that was all she wrote. John vamoosed after about a year, leaving me with a pile of debts and this little slice of picturesque pie. There was no way I was up to wrangling a herd of beef on my own, and I couldn’t afford to hire a lot of help.”
    “That must have been scary,” Merry said. Her own debts were daunting enough. If she’d been left high and dry in a place as isolated as Aguas Milagros, she’d have lost her mind.
    “Nah, not scary, really,” Dolly demurred. “But those were tough times, I’ll admit. And I made a few questionable choices, let a few choose me.” A smile lifted her lips.
    “Oh, really?” Merry asked. She sensed the story was about to get good.
    “Yup.” Dolly settled more comfortably in her seat. “I fell for the fool alpacas around the time John lit out, and getting myself a passel of them was nutty enough, but it was the damn llamas that really sealed my fate. A friend ,” she said darkly after a sip of her sludge, “saddled me with the first of them. What can I say; I was feeling a bit vulnerable at the time.” She shook her head ruefully. “Well, let me back up.” She took a deep breath, let out a smoker’s hack, and launched into her tale. “It began with one particular llama named Mario, who turned out to be Marianne , and who turned out to be pregnant, the sneaky so-and-so.”
    Merry lifted a brow—the more piratical one, since it was already higher than the other. “A sneakily pregnant llama named Marianne?”
    Dolly nodded. “I’d bought the first of the alpacas already—a herd sire, a couple promising pedigreed females. Spent way too much on them—this was before the great alpaca bubble of ’09 burst, and back then us fiber farmers all thought we’d struck woolly gold. I was still learning about spinning and grading fleece—I’ve always been a keen crocheter, but I couldn’t tell my grade one from the kind that’s only good for stuffing and rug weaving, never mind guess the microns just by eyeball.”
    Merry decided an explanation of “microns” could wait. “Mm,” she said encouragingly.
    Dolly obviously sensed