Last Chance Llama Ranch

by Hilary Fields

  Sam, Merry was pleased to note, actually flushed. “I’m just looking out for you, Aunt Dolly,” he’d muttered. “I’m still not convinced hiring her on was a good idea. We don’t know anything about this woman. She could just be using you as fodder for that blog of hers.”

  Merry took a breath, feeling a flush of anger as red as the ridiculous pajamas her mother had sent her. Irritation made her forget why she’d charged outdoors in flimsy nightwear and one sock. “This woman,” she hissed, “is standing right here. And she may be a writer, but she’s not a user. And it’s not a blog, it’s a magazine column. Yes, I’m going to write about this experience—Dolly already said she’s cool with it—but I intend to pull my own weight while I’m here.”

  Sam looked her over again, not failing to note her broad shoulders and sturdy frame. “Well, if that’s true, I guess you’ll pull a fair bit.”

  Merry went scarlet. Oh, so that’s how we’re going to play it? Sam had already struck her as a bit of a butthole; now she suspected he might be an outright adversary.

  I’ve faced worse, she thought. Hell, my mother’s mildest critique makes his snark look like flattery. No way I’m letting him blow my first “Don’t Do What I Did” gig. Even if DDWID ends up meaning “don’t kick your host’s nephew in his hairy derriere.”

  I. Am not. Quitting.

  “We can’t all be as low to the ground as you, Mr. Cassidy,” Merry said through clenched teeth, channeling her mother’s iciest voice. “Perhaps I’ll be able to hand you down bales from the hayloft.”

  Sam scowled, as Merry had expected. But then something happened that she hadn’t been expecting. As she studied her challenger, she saw it…one corner of his lips twitched upward. It was a smile so reluctant, so grudging, she’d wager it cost him a week’s pay. It skidded across his craggy face, an unnerving sight, like watching a Mister Softee truck crash and burn while the cheerful jingle played on. And then it was gone. Merry wasn’t sure if that evanescent smile had been disarming or alarming, but somehow she was glad she’d pierced his paranoid attitude, if only for a second. Underneath the prickly hedgehog exterior, maybe the grumpy galoot had a sense of humor?

  “Touché,” murmured Sam. Then louder, “Alright then, let’s see what you can do. How about you change into something a bit more…appropriate…and we’ll get you started.”

  Merry remembered the reason she’d run out into the yard en déshabillé. She opened her mouth to explain why she’d dashed out of the cabin like a silk-swathed wraith, to blurt out the eerie encounter she’d had, then shut it with a snap. In the light of day—which was beginning to spread spectacularly across the valley in streaks of rose and gold—it seemed ridiculous to start raving about poltergeists. They’ll think I’m loony. Some total stranger, clearly a ranch noob, comes bumbling into their lives and starts rambling about disappearing socks in the dark…? No, Merry, she told herself. Better save this story for the mag. Sam might try to use it as a reason to get Merry ousted from the ranch. He was obviously not pleased with her presence, though she’d done nothing she could think of to warrant his instantaneous dislike.

  Dolly obviously agreed. She harrumphed. “Who runs this ranch, Sam Cassidy?” she asked acerbically. “Me or you? I assign the work around here, at least with my alpacas. Why don’t you go see to the llamas while I give Merry here the lay of the land. You’ve got a tour running this afternoon up at the preserve, don’t you? So why don’t you go see if the boys are all set for their stroll.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes ma’am,” said Sam. He turned from Merry with an inscrutable backward glance—warning? Speculation? Merry decided she didn’t care. She also decided she loved Dolly.

  “All right then, Merry. First thing, shower. Then clothes. Then breakfast,” Dolly said decisively.

  Yup. I love her. “Yes, ma’am!”

  With that, Merry had dashed back to the cabin to write up her post before the events of the morning could escape her. A hot minute later, she arrived on Dolly’s doorstep with her toiletries and a change of clothes, jonesing for the promised shower and some grub. Dolly was happy to grant both to her new hire. After a shower just slightly longer than the hot water held out, clad in a loose-fitting pair of men’s jeans and a tank top worn under an Abercrombie hoodie that had been a present from her brother (swag from a recent catalog shoot), Merry eased herself down at Dolly’s kitchen table. She allowed herself to look around again—last night she’d been too tired to take much in, and Dolly had kept the lights pretty low.

  Home on the range.

  “I love your kitchen, Mrs. Cassidy,” she told the older woman. “Seriously, the whole hacienda is just…I don’t know…delicious.”

  Delicious was exactly the right word. While the rest of the ranch seemed a bit dilapidated to Merry, Dolly’s home was snug and charming, with whitewashed stucco-over-adobe walls, nichos filled with dried wildflowers, and fluttering lacework curtains draping gauzily over old-fashioned wood-paned windows left open to catch the morning’s cool breeze. Bookshelves stuffed to bursting with well-thumbed paperbacks of every stripe from pulp to Pulitzer winner lined most every wall. The ceiling was fairly low, supported by vigas—chunky, rough-hewn logs that ran right through the walls and protruded beyond the adobe exterior, log-cabin-style. Open-planned, with just a half-height wall and a couple of shallow steps up to separate the kitchen from the living room, one could see everything of the house from the dining table except the bedrooms and baths. Rag rugs warmed the knotty pine floorboards, and crocheted doilies adorned the arms of the somewhat saggy chenille-upholstered sofa. An antique spinning wheel sat nearby, a basket of new-spun wool at its feet. Wow, she thought. People actually still spin? A calico cat, fat and placid, occupied the house’s sunniest spot, blinking sleepily at Merry from the rug by the sofa.

  The older woman beamed. “Ain’t you a peach?” She plunked two steaming plates of huevos divorciados down on the scarred, round wooden table that dominated the sunny little kitchen, poured satisfyingly dark coffee from an old-fashioned Chemex carafe into two earthenware mugs, then seated herself. “This maybe ain’t the life I imagined for myself, but I’ve got the house fairly well the way I like it.”

  Merry was distracted into forgetting the astoundingly good smell of the food in front of her, though her stomach growled in protest at being denied the dish of fried eggs divided by a dam of refried beans and tortilla chips, one egg topped in salsa verde, the other in salsa roja. This isn’t the life she chose? Dolly seemed so at home Merry could hardly envision her anyplace else. “Do you mind if I ask…?” she began. “I’d love to learn more about you. For the magazine, I mean. I mean, not just for the mag, but my readers would love to get to know you. Or,” she paused, concerned, “do you need me to get a move on? I do really want to pull my weight—my considerable weight, as your nephew would say.”

  Dolly snorted. “Never mind Sam. Boy’s got a bee up his butt this morning, though I don’t know why. He gets ornery every now ’n’ then, but that’s his own business. Moody so-and-so.” Dolly passed Merry a worn but scrupulously clean cotton napkin. “Eat up, hon. We can talk after we chaw. I wanna get to know you a bit too, and the fluffies can wait awhile—there’s plenty of natural grazing right now with the good monsoon rains we’ve been having, and they ain’t too high-maintenance, not really.”

  Five minutes later Merry had divorciadoed her huevos from the plate, and relocated the to-die-for dish to her stomach. “Oh, man, that’s good,” she sighed, patting her tum. “With food like that, you could make this place a major tourist destination if you wanted to.”

  Dolly beamed. “I do cook for the guests we take on overnight adventures,” she said modestly. “And I send along picnic baskets for the ‘lunch with the llamas’ tours. Haven’t heard any complaints yet.”

  Merry had seen the Cassidys’ ancient, cringe-worthy website, so she had an idea what they offered tourists. But she—and her readers—needed to know more. “I’d love to he
ar all about it,” she encouraged. “What you do here, I mean, and how you came to run the ranch.”

  Dolly waggled a finger at her guest. “Not without more coffee.” She poured Merry a second cup of spoon-could-stand-up-in-it sludge, handing over the mug with a jerk of her head to indicate Merry should precede her out the door. Merry, who never messed with a woman who had perfected the secret to effective caffeination, did as bid and stepped out onto a porch guarded by a row of rattan rocking chairs.

  Her breath caught in a totally wham-out-of-the-blue sob.

  “Oh,” she said, a bare wisp of sound. Merry’s butt thumped onto the seat of one of the chairs. Her eyes filled with tears that didn’t quite spill over, blurring the very sight that had started the waterworks. What she’d seen last night had been impressive enough. But out back…

  Dorothy Cassidy had a million-dollar view.

  A hundred miles of painters and poets’ inspiration rolled and rollicked from Dolly’s humble stoop all the way to the horizon. A field of rough southwestern scrub grass, saturated a rare deep mint from the recent monsoons, was rimmed on either side by stately cottonwoods, their boles wrinkly as Shar-Peis and their bushy canopies teased into music by the breeze. A little creek could be seen to one side, glinting in the morning light. And 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 she’d digressed. “Anyhoo, I was just getting started with my alpaca breeding program, though they were mostly pets at that time. Then Needlepoint Bob swings by the hacienda one afternoon, all hangdog with those soulful brown eyes. He’s hauling Mario behind him on a lead.” She scowled. “And ol’ Bob, he starts in with the sales pitch. ‘Oh Dolly, you’ll love him.’” She made her deep voice even deeper, imitating this oddly named mystery man. “‘Llamas are great guard dogs. They’re so low-maintenance. They carry your packs. And so friendly!’”

  Dolly sighed. “Well, Mario was pretty cute, and Needlepoint Bob swore he couldn’t keep him, since he was selling his acreage and moving into the trailer behind the café. So I said, sure, put him in the high pasture, and then Bob really turns on the charm. ‘Mario’s got a few buddies—just a couple!’ he swears. ‘They all grew up together, so it wouldn’t really be fair to separate them.’ As if they were kittens.” Dolly shook her head, remembering.

  “So how many was a couple?” Merry asked.

  “Six.” Dolly laughed ruefully. “And five of them pregnant, by the last. Didn’t find out until eleven months later—they gestate for nearly a year, you know, and I hadn’t thought to second-guess Bob on the subject of their sex. Now, they were good guard dogs, I’ll admit—they’ll set to stamping and squealing if any predator comes near. I’ve seen ’em scare off a mountain lion, if you can believe.”

  Merry had never seen a mountain lion in action outside of the odd National Geo channel special, but she guessed from Dolly’s tone they were fairly fierce. “Wow,” she said. “So what happened?”

  “Once you get a reputation for being a llama lover, you’re really in for it. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry comes out of the woodwork; ‘Oh please, won’t you take Tweedledum and Tweedledee?’ ‘Oh, Dolly, you’re such a saint. Can’t you care for this poor, broken-down boy my grandma left me?’” She sucked back the last of her coffee. “And what was I gonna say? They were all headed for slaughter if I couldn’t take ’em in. So next thing I know, I got sixteen of the critters, all munching their weight in hay and looking to me to love ’em. Which I did, even though it wasn’t doing my wallet any favors. I’d always thought I’d spend my later years traveling the world,” she said with a wistful look in her eyes. “Had all the brochures ordered—Paris to the Pyramids, Thailand to Timbuktu—but after Bob stuck me with the damn llamas, well, all that went out the window, along with every spare cent I had. The money my alpaca yarn brought in couldn’t begin to cover their keep. If it weren’t for Sam coming to live with me just when I was about to go bust, and him coming up with the idea to run llama tours, we’d have gone under years ago. Least now the buggers work for a living.”

  Hearing the obvious love and pride in her hostess’s tone, Merry began to see Sam Cassidy in a slightly more charitable light. Slightly. “You can’t use llama fur for yarn?” she asked, leaning one arm over the porch rail, mostly empty coffee
cup dangling from her hand.

  “Wool. Not fur,” Dolly corrected with a smile. “Oh no, hon. I mean, you can, but you wouldn’t wanna wear a sweater made out of it. Maybe a wall hanging or a jacket if it had a thick lining. But a working llama’s bred with the kinda coat that doesn’t make great yarn—least, the ones I adopted are. And alpaca’s just a whole ’nother ball game—once you go ’pac, we like to say, you never go back.”

  And it was at that moment that Merry learned why.

  Something stuck its nose in her coffee cup.

  And snuffled.

  Merry jumped, the last drizzle of her coffee leaping from the cup…and onto the muzzle of one very innocent-looking alpaca.

  “Oh. My. God,” Merry breathed.

  Want.

  Want.

  Want. Want. Want. Want. Want.

  Boudicca polished off the last of my coffee with a slurp, then shook her head as if to say, “You coulda added some sugar.” I apologized as best I could. After all, I didn’t want to get on my new bestie’s bad side.

  Boudie is a little gray gal with an Afro, absurdly long lashes, and an attitude that plainly says, “I’m the cutest thing in three counties.” And folks, she isn’t wrong. Despite—or perhaps because of—a slight limp Dolly tells me came from a recent encounter with some stray barbed wire (the leg is now festively bandaged with bright pink stretchy tape), the lass stole my heart like a thief in a Hollywood heist movie…which is to say, with preternatural ease. Apparently, she didn’t object to my company either, for she proceeded to escort me and my hostess for much of my first day, gamboling along at our sides and generally proving a worthy tour guide. I can only hope to do as well for you, dear readers.

  So let me set the scene.

  Now, a fiber farm is much like any other farm, except way, way cuter. One’s first impression of the Last Chance is of just how vast, lonely, and unspoiled it is. Situated a little less than forty-five minutes’ drive from the world-class skiing of Taos, and just about seventy from the state capital of Santa Fe (where I hear you can get some really tasty baked goods), the flyspeck of Aguas Milagros, NM, (named for some hot springs I’ll be checking out ASAP), may not have traffic lights, or Whole Foods, but it has got a lot of Wild West charm going on. And the Last Chance, I’ll wager, is its crowning jewel. Or sharpest spur, or whatever the appropriate cowboy-town metaphor is. Nestled in a valley ringed with mountains that stay snowcapped practically all year round, the property spreads out in an unending carpet of seedy green grasses, scrubby sagebrush, and the occasional cactus, everywhere dotted by cotton balls that aren’t cotton balls at all, but wool. And these cotton balls are quite curious about strangers.