The feed store smelled like sawdust and gasoline and something warm and alive that no supermarket has smelled like in fifty years.
Under a heat lamp by the register, in a galvanized stock tank, fifty chicks the size of ping-pong balls with legs were losing their minds over starter crumble. The store owner — a woman named Deb, reading glasses pushed up into gray curls — watched me count them, one by one.
"Taking the whole bin?"
"Twenty-five hens, twenty-five du—" I stopped. Recalculated. "Make it thirty hens. I go through a lot of eggs."
Deb wrote it up without so much as a flicker. Country stores have seen everything — and what they haven't, they decided long ago not to ask about.
"You'll want that heat lamp for three weeks," she said. "Keep the coop locked up tight — we've got coyotes out here that'd chew up your truck before they'd touch your birds."
Locked up tight. I almost laughed. Ma'am, I have a kill zone.
· ·
The hatchery was forty minutes north, down a road that turned to gravel, then to dirt, then to legend.
I'd found it on a state agriculture website — fish fry for pond stocking, tilapia, catfish, bluegill — and it was exactly what the internet promised: a low tin barn, a hundred blue tanks, and a man named Roy, holding a five-inch catfish up to the light like a jeweler with a diamond.
"Cave pond?" he said, after I told him where the water came from. "Water runs about fifty-six degrees year-round, doesn't it?"
"Fifty-six," I said.
"Then you want trout, not catfish." He was already scooping. "Catfish sulks in cold water. Trout? A trout thinks heaven is fifty-six degrees." He bagged me three hundred fingerlings like it was groceries. "Feed them anything. Feed them each other, eventually, if you get lazy. Good fish."
I liked Roy. I put him third on the list.
· ·
That half a beef was the smoothest deal I've ever pulled off in my life.
I called a pasture ranch outside town and said the magic American words: "I'd like to buy half a beef, hanging weight." Twelve minutes later I owned four hundred pounds of future steaks, ground, roasts, and bones — processing paid, freezer pick-up Thursday, headed for the chest freezer I will never plug in. Because meat that keeps was never frozen meat. It's canned meat. And by Friday I owned a pressure canner and a manual so thick it doubled as the confidence to use it. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
The goats came off Craigslist — because where else?
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Two Nubian does, listed as "good with kids, good with dogs, loud," from a family whose ad read like a surrender note. I paid the two hundred dollars, tied them into the truck bed with far more rope than the job strictly required, and spent the drive home learning, word by word, exactly why that last adjective in the ad had been set in italics.
Summer rode in the cab, ears swiveled back like twin radar dishes, professionally outraged.
· ·
Saturday was the livestock auction.
The auction barn sat on the edge of town like it had grown there: a packed-dirt floor, bleachers full of old men in ball caps, and an auctioneer whose words weren't words so much as weather — a front rolling through at ninety miles an hour: do-I-hear-twofifty-gimme-twoseventyfive-gimme-three-sold.
I'd come for three sows. I stayed three hours — because a livestock auction is the best show in the county. An eighty-year-old in overalls bidding against a cell phone. A kid who couldn't have been twelve selling two lambs and shaking the buyer's hand like a senator. And when a pen of mixed-breed ewes went up and nobody in the whole barn made a sound, everyone looked around for the fool crazy enough to bid — and found me.
The old man in overalls leaned over. "Goats'll eat your fence, your garden, and your patience, little lady."
"They can try," I said. "I've got a cave."
He looked at me for a second, then at the pen, then back — the exact face of a man recalibrating everything he'd assumed about a stranger. "Limestone, is it? Good cave. What for?"
"Dry as a deacon."
He nodded slowly, wearing the satisfaction of a man who had just heard the exactly right answer, and turned back to the ring as if that settled everything worth settling. "Then you'll do." And out of pure professional courtesy, he bid against me on the very next pen.
[DEPOSIT: LIVESTOCK — 3 SOWS, 5 GOATS, 60 POULTRY — VALUED AT $3,100]
Note: livestock are living deposits. They must be tended, fed, and spoken to kindly.
"The internet knows how to do all of that," I said.
Noted. Revising your survival odds.
· ·
Sunday morning, the cave was a barn. Chicks under the heat lamp by the workbench, ducklings detonating their water dish on schedule every forty minutes, the goats chained outside in a scrub-oak clearing I'd fenced with three rolls of wire and prayer, the sows in a pen behind the loading bay, and three hundred trout fingerlings circling the deep tank in the cool chamber like they owned the place.
Summer had appointed herself Minister of Everything, herding ducklings back from the water dish with the focused patience of a bomb technician. The goats, per the Craigslist prophecy, screamed. All day. At nothing. Loud.
I stood in the middle of all of it, holding a feed scoop, laughed until my ribs hurt.
In my first life, I survived ten years alone in the ruins, and I couldn't have told you the last time I'd laughed. This life, I had two days of animal chaos, a minor coyote problem, and — when my phone buzzed against my hip — a text from a number I hadn't saved.
UNKNOWN:Heard you bought a farm. Chase says you're in over your head. If you need to sell, we know buyers. Family helps family :)
Beth. The smiley face gave her away — she is the only member of that family who ends her threats with emojis.
I looked at my farm. I looked at the trout. I looked at the screaming goats, the dog with a portfolio, and twenty fruit trees asleep in the dark, waiting for me to build them a light room tomorrow.
In way over my head.
Ten days left, Beth, I thought. Ten days until your buyers, your money, and every other word in your vocabulary stop meaning anything — and the only thing in this county that will still be worth anything is a hole in the ground with a goat in it.
I typed back one word.
ME:Pass.