3. Chapter 3
Elise
I’ve been on Wylde Mountain for four days and I’ve thought about Raiford Wylde’s ranch approximately seven hundred times, which averages out to about once every eight minutes during waking hours. This is concerning.
It’s not him. It’s the land. It’s not the way he sits a horse like the saddle was built around him.
It’s not the width of his shoulders or the way his jaw looks in morning light or the low gravel of his voice saying “ma’am” like it was a word he’d been saving for someone specific.
It’s not the way his hands looked on the barn door, wide and rough and capable, or the way I keep wondering what those hands would feel like on my body.
I’m lying to myself and I’m bad at it because I’ve never been a liar. I can lie about as well as I can tap dance, which is to say I’ve attempted it once and everyone involved agreed I should stop.
Jules finds me on the porch at 10 AM with my second coffee and a book I’m holding.
“You’re not reading that book,” she says.
“I’m reading it slowly.”
“You’ve been on page forty-seven for two days. I know because I checked.”
“That’s an invasion of privacy.”
“It’s an observation. I observe things. It’s literally my job.
” She sits next to me. She’s got her phone and her coffee and is about to say something she’s been composing in her head for approximately forty-eight hours.
I can tell because I know the look on her face.
I’ve known this look since we were seven years old and she convinced me to jump off the hayloft into a pile of hay that did little to cushion the landing. And had a pitchfork in it.
“What,” I say.
“I have an idea.”
“No.”
“You haven’t heard the idea.”
“Your ideas involve pitchforks.”
“That was ONE TIME. We were seven. I have evolved.” She turns her phone toward me. On the screen is a text conversation with Dane. “Raiford needs help.”
I look at the texts. Dane telling Jules that Raiford’s looking for someone to manage a new section of the operation.
The ranch is expanding grazing into the north valley, which requires new fencing, water infrastructure, and herd management for a hundred additional head.
His current team is stretched. He needs someone with experience.
Someone who knows cattle and land and fencing and can manage a crew.
“He needs a range manager,” I say. I’ve done this. Not at this scale, but the principles are the same. This is what I grew up doing. This is what I’m good at.
“He needs YOU,” Jules says.
“He needs a range manager. There are range managers everywhere.”
“Dane says Raiford’s been putting off the expansion for a year because he can’t find someone he trusts with the north valley. He won’t hire just anyone. He needs someone who understands land, not just livestock.”
I look at the mountains. Raiford’s mountains. The same mountains I’ve been staring at from this porch for four days while pretending to read page forty-seven.
“He wouldn’t want me,” I say.
“You made an impression. And you need a job. And the job needs you. And the ranch is right there.” She points.
Toward the ridge. Toward twelve thousand acres of the most beautiful land I’ve ever seen.
“Dane’s going to mention it to Raiford. Not as a setup.
As a practical solution to a practical problem. ”
“Jules.”
“If he says no, he says no. If he says yes, you have a job on a ranch that made you cry about grass.”
“I didn’t cry about grass.”
“Your eyes were wet and you were looking at grass.”
Dane mentioned it to Raiford. Then sent me and Jules a screenshot of his reply.
Raiford: Tell her to be at the north gate Monday at 6 AM. We’ll walk the section.
That’s it. No interview. No resume review. No “tell me about your experience.” He watched me ride his horse and cross his creek and discuss his fencing and that was the interview.
I’m sitting on the guest room bed at Jules and Dane’s cabin holding my phone and looking at this message and my heart is doing something it hasn’t done in a year.
It’s beating faster. Not anxiety faster.
Anticipation faster. The way it used to beat on the first morning of calving season at home, when you wake up before dawn and the barn is waiting and the work is real and the land needs you.
A ranch needs me. Not just any ranch. Raiford Wylde’s ranch. The biggest ranch I’ve ever set foot on, with the best grass I’ve ever seen and the best fencing I’ve ever inspected and a man who runs it alone because he hasn’t found anyone he trusts with it.
He’s trusting me with his north valley. I don’t know him well enough to understand how big that is, but I know ranchers.
I know what it means to hand someone a section of your land and say “manage this.” It means you’re giving them a piece of yourself.
It means you believe they’ll care for it the way you would.
I need to find a place to live. I can’t stay at Dane and Jules’s indefinitely. I text Jules.
Me: I need to find a rental. Something close to the ranch.
Jules: Already handled. Dane says there’s a foreman’s cabin on the property. Small, one bedroom, been empty since the last range manager left two years ago. Raiford said you can have it if you want it.
I’m going to live on his ranch. I’m going to live in a cabin on Raiford Wylde’s property and manage his north valley and see him every day. Every morning at the gate. Every evening at the barn.
Me: Is the cabin in good shape?
Jules: Dane says it needs work. Raiford says he’ll have it cleaned up by Monday.
Me: He’s going to clean a cabin for me in three days?
Jules: He’s going to have his crew clean a cabin for you in three days. Raiford Wylde doesn’t clean. Raiford Wylde delegates cleaning while pretending the cleaning isn’t important to him. Dane says Raiford is currently at the cabin RIGHT NOW inspecting it personally. At 9 PM. With a flashlight.
I put the phone down. I look at the ceiling. A man I’ve spent only a few hours with is walking through a cabin at 9 PM with a flashlight making sure it’s good enough for me.
This is a job. A professional arrangement.
So why does the image of Raiford Wylde walking through my cabin after dark with a flashlight feel distinctly unprofessional?
Monday. 5:45 AM. The north gate.
I’m early because I’m always early. My parents taught me that showing up on time means you’re late and showing up early means you’re ready. I’m in jeans and boots and a flannel and my hair is in a braid and I’ve got a thermos of coffee and a notebook and I’m ready.
The ranch in the early morning is different than at midday. The light is blue and thin and the grass has dew on it and the mountains are shadows, not monuments. Everything is quiet.
The cattle in the east pasture are dark shapes against the gray-green. A hawk circles above the tree line. The fence posts along the north boundary stand like sentries.
His truck comes up the road at 5:55. He’s early too. Of course he is.
He gets out. He’s in jeans and boots and a canvas jacket and his hair is pushed back and his jaw is set and he looks like he slept about four hours, which on a ranch is generous. He’s carrying a thermos.
His shoulders strain the canvas jacket. His jeans sit low on his hips in a way that I’m going to pretend I didn’t notice and will absolutely think about later.
He hasn’t shaved and the stubble along his jaw is dark and I want to touch it just to know what it feels like under my fingers.
What it would feel like against my face. Or somewhere else that’s sensitive.
“Morning,” he says.
“Morning.”
He looks at me. A quick scan. Boots (work boots, not fashion). Jeans (worn, not bought distressed). Flannel (functional, not aesthetic). Notebook (she’s taking notes, good). His assessment takes about three seconds and whatever he concludes he keeps to himself.
“The north valley is eight hundred acres,” he says. He starts walking. I walk with him. His stride is long and I match it as best I can.
“The expansion adds a hundred head to our operation. We’re currently at four-fifty across the main sections.
The north valley has been fallow for two years.
Good grass but no infrastructure. We need fencing on three boundaries, water access from the north creek, and a handling facility for processing. ”
He talks about his ranch the way I do: in specifics. Acre counts, head numbers, fencing specifications, water flow rates. He doesn’t explain things I should already know. He doesn’t simplify. He talks to me like a professional because I am.
We walk the section. Eight hundred acres takes time. We walk the perimeter, check the soil, examine the creek access, identify the best locations for fencing posts and water troughs. He asks my opinion. Not as a formality. He asks because he wants to know what I see.
“Where would you put the handling facility?” he says. We’re standing on a rise, the valley spread out below us, the creek to the north, the tree line to the west.
I look at the land. I read it as a system. Water, grass, terrain, wind patterns, shade, drainage. The handling facility needs to be accessible from the main road, close to water, on flat ground with good drainage.
“Southwest corner,” I say. “Flat ground, good drainage, road access from the existing track. You’d need to extend the track about two hundred yards but the terrain is easy. Put the chute facing east so the morning sun doesn’t blind the cattle coming through.”
He looks at me. Then he looks at the southwest corner. Then he looks at me again.
“That’s where I’d put it,” he says.
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it’s the only place that makes sense if you’re thinking about the cattle, not the convenience. Southwest corner gives you drainage and access, and an east-facing chute keeps them from walking into the afternoon sun.”
He’s quiet. The wind moves the grass around us. The valley is beautiful in the early light, the kind of beautiful that makes your chest hurt because you know beauty like this doesn’t belong to you, it just lets you stand on it for a while.
“You think like a rancher,” he says.
“I am a rancher. I just don’t have a ranch.”
The words come out before I check them. Honest enough to leave me feeling exposed.
I am a rancher without a ranch. That’s the sentence that’s been living in my chest for a year.
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. We stand on the rise with the valley below us and the wind in the grass and the mountains holding the sky up.
We’re both quiet. It’s comfortable.
“Come on,” he says finally. “I’ll show you the cabin.”
I follow him to the foreman’s cabin. It’s small.
One bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, a porch that faces the valley.
It’s been cleaned. The floors are swept, the windows are washed, the bed is made with sheets that smell fresh.
There are towels in the bathroom and dish soap by the sink and a box of coffee pods on the counter.
“It’s not much,” he says.
He’s standing in the doorway. Filling it.
His shoulders nearly touch both sides of the frame and his head almost brushes the top and the entire doorway has become a frame for a man I should not be looking at the way I’m looking at him.
But the light is behind him and his body is a silhouette that takes up the whole opening and I’m thinking about what it would be like to walk through a door that required pressing past him.
Chest to chest. His body against mine in a doorframe.
I’m thinking about this while holding a thermos and standing in a cabin I’m renting from my employer and I need to think about fencing.
“It’s perfect,” I say.
And I mean it. Not because the cabin is special. Because it’s on this land. Because the porch faces the valley with the good view and the man in the doorway checked this cabin at 9 PM with a flashlight to make sure it was good enough.
His eyes stay on mine a second too long.
“Good.”
One word. Somehow it lands low in my stomach.
“You start tomorrow,” he says. “6 AM. North gate.”
“I’ll be there at 5:45.”
The corner of his mouth moves. The geological event. The tectonic shift that doesn’t quite reach the surface. One day I’m going to see the full version of whatever’s underneath that almost-smile and I’m going to be completely unprepared for it.
“5:45 works,” he says.
He leaves. I stand in the cabin that is now mine, on a ranch that is now my workplace, overlooking a valley that needs infrastructure, a hundred head of cattle, and apparently me.
I set my thermos on the counter. I look out the window. The valley. The mountains.
I’m home. Not permanently. Not officially. But the feeling in my chest when I look out this window is the feeling I had every morning on my parents’ ranch when I woke up and the land was there and the work was waiting.
This isn’t my ranch. It’s his. But the work is mine, and for the first time in a year, the work feels like it matters.
I don’t think about the way Raiford Wylde fills a doorway. I don’t think about the almost-smile or the flashlight at 9 PM or the coffee pods on the counter.
Definitely not the man.
That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.