Western Montana is beautiful country. The prairie grasses, rock formations, and endless sky create a unique, desolate beauty. I grew up here, a small town minister's daughter in a tiny community nowhere near anything. My parents served the people of our church, and we enjoyed a simple life, just the three of us, in the parsonage. As a teen I worked summers at a local ranch where I helped care for the horses. I graduated high school and left that fall for the state university.
In January of my freshman year, my world fell apart. One Sunday morning I got a phone call from my boyfriend and high school sweetheart, Tobias. My parents had failed to show up at church that morning, something completely unheard of. Several church members tried calling, but there was no answer. Marcus Eaton, my boyfriend's father and a deacon at the church, took the extra set of keys and went to investigate. When my parents didn't come to the door, he let himself in. There he found my mom and dad curled up in their bed, dead. Their furnace had malfunctioned, and they didn't have a carbon monoxide detector to warn them.
I remember Tobias calling that morning, but after that it all gets fuzzy. I didn't have a car, so he told me he would make the four hour drive to pick me up. I remember telling my roommate, Christina, and pulling my suitcases out from under my bed. Then I sat down and spaced out.
Christina was a good roommate, and she's still a good friend. While we waited for Tobias she washed and dried my dirty clothes and folded them right into the suitcase. She emptied my closet, and stayed near me. She brought me tissues I didn't need and water I didn't drink. I don't remember any of it.
The first thing I was aware of was Tobias' blue eyes and feeling his arms around me. The dam burst, and I sobbed until there was nothing left and I passed out from exhaustion. Christina enlisted our friend Lynn to help finish my packing, and Tobias loaded all of my things and my sleeping body into his dad's pickup truck.
I woke up about an hour into our drive home, and I was so distraught that Tobias had to pull over on the shoulder of a desolate stretch of interstate highway to comfort me. He took me to the home of another church deacon, Ethan Black, who happened to be the father of my friend Susan. Susan and her family took me in and cared for me during the weeks after I lost my parents.
Small town people, especially church folks, are some of the kindest people in the world. When the investigation was closed and my parents' life insurance check arrived, the Blacks and I were still eating food brought by thoughtful neighbors who just wanted to do something to help. I couldn't walk down the street without being hugged by well-meaning ladies. While I appreciated their kindness, and their obvious love and respect for my parents, I grew tired of being 'the daughter of the dead minister and his wife.' I wanted to get on with my life, but I was nineteen, and completely lost.
About three months after my parents' death, Tobias took me out on our first date since the tragedy. We got ice cream from a local shop and went out into the country to be alone, just like we had countless times in high school. As we watched the sun set from the back of Tobias' rusty old truck, he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him using his late mother's wedding ring.
I accepted, and we decided that a short engagement and quiet wedding would suit us best. A local judge married us at my father's church. The only people there with us were Tobias' father and the Black family.
Using my parents' life insurance money, Tobias and I bought a ranch about two hours' drive from our hometown. I liked being away from the people we had known our whole lives. There we weren't Marcus' son and the dead minister's daughter, we were just Tobias and Tris, a young ranching couple. We raised horses and grew wheat on a piece of ground we called Dauntless Ranch.
We loved it there. The land came with a little white farmhouse, and we made it a home, hoping to fill it with children and to grow old together there. But life isn't perfect. In spite of two years of trying (and as young newlyweds we did plenty of trying!), Tobias and I were unable to conceive. We visited a specialist at the nearest large town, and he discovered that Tobias was unable to have children.
Men and women tend to handle this kind of news differently. I immediately decided that we should adopt. A woman's maternal instinct isn't terribly concerned with blood relations. I knew I could be mom to my child even if he or she didn't share our DNA. Tobias had a harder time with it, as many men do. He felt like a failure and less of a man because he couldn't impregnate me, and he was reluctant to give up and take on someone else's children. But eventually he gave in, and around the time of our fourth anniversary we started climbing the mountain of paperwork necessary to adopt a child.
On August 23rd, four and a half years into our happily ever after, my world stopped turning. We got a call that day from a neighbor. He had bought a new horse, a large, all-white stallion, and when the former owners delivered it, they put it straight in its pen in his barn. The animal seemed a bit skittish, and didn't let our neighbor pet it that first night, but he figured it would settle in. The next day he opened the stall door to take the new animal out to the corral for some exercise, and it bolted. He managed to get it out of the barn and into the corral, but he didn't know what to do as the animal continued to go wild.
Tobias had a solid reputation for his skills in working with horses, and though our houses were six miles apart (if one took the roads), we were the man's nearest neighbors. So we hopped into our truck and took off for the neighboring ranch.
When we arrived we could see what the man was talking about. The horse, a beautiful animal, was leaping and bucking around the pen like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum. He kicked at the fence penning him in, threw his body around wildly, and made angry noises the likes of which I have not heard from a horse before or since.
Tobias suggested that since there were no other horses in the pen to hurt we should let the animal wear itself out for a bit. Our neighbor, an older man who lived alone, brought us cups of steaming hot coffee, and we stood around the corral sipping our coffee and visiting while we waited for the possessed creature to tire out.
When the horse calmed down a bit, Tobias ventured into the corral, speaking to the it in a soothing voice. At first it only seemed wary, stepping backward as Tobias approached it. But when he got close, the bucking resumed and the animal went back to its wild ways. Tobias couldn't get away fast enough, and the horse kicked him and knocked him to the ground. When he was down he did his best to curl up and protect himself, but everything was flailing hooves, thick dust, and deafening noise. Suddenly a shot rang out, and the horse stumbled, then fell to the ground, partially covering my husband.
I scurried over the fence and ran straight for the man I loved, but there was nothing that could be done. Tobias' head was split open and he was dead before I got to his side.
The neighbor called the sheriff, who arrived a half hour later with the local doctor who served as the county's coroner, the volunteer ambulance squad, two deputies, and our best friends, Zeke and his wife Shauna. Just like the day my parents died, I was a zombie. But this time there was no Tobias to hold me together.
Zeke drove my truck home, and Shauna and I followed in their SUV. They stayed with me as I called Marcus and made arrangements with the church and the funeral home. I thought about taking Tobias back to our hometown and burying him near my parents, but I planned to stay at Dauntless, so I wanted him near. There was an ancient rural cemetery on our land, and I got permission to bury him with the settlers who had rested there since the late 1800s.
For weeks our friends helped me hold my life together. Shauna and Zeke stayed with me for the first few days, accepting covered dishes from church ladies and neighbors. Zeke's brother, Uriah, and his girlfriend Marlene came out to care for the horses. Their mother, Hanna, who had treated Tobias and I like her own children and even invited us to holidays since we moved to the area, came out to help with the housework. The man whose horse had killed Tobias gathered a crew to finish harvesting our wheat. My college roommate Christina and her boyfriend, Will, came for a few days. Another college friend, Lynn, graduated that December and came to stay with me for the winter months.
Every day it got a little easier to breathe. Every day I took more notice of my ranch and the things that needed tending. I couldn't have survived those lost months without my friends, but by spring I was managing. I missed Tobias every day, and I mourned for the life and plans we lost, but I was ready to live again.
I rented out the wheat fields to a local farmer. We owned our ranch outright thanks to my parents' life insurance, but we had loans on our bigger farm equipment. I made payments that first year, but the lease setup went so well that I sold the equipment a year later and decided that my focus would be on the horses.
We had three horses when Tobias died. Two were our personal riding horses, Lightning and Flash, and the third was a beauty we had just bought for breeding purposes. The spring after Tobias passed I had the new mare inseminated and my little herd grew. I bought two more horses that fall, bringing my family up to 6 horses, two chocolate labs, and me.
Training and caring for my horses kept me busy, and my reputation as a breeder and trainer grew. I wanted to expand my operation, but I knew that if I got any more animals I wouldn't be able to handle it on my own. So that year instead of adding to my herd, I added on to my property and built a bunkhouse beside the barn. The bunkhouse had two nice-sized apartments, like a little duplex. Each had one bedroom, a living room/kitchen combo, and a bathroom. The bunkhouse was built to be sturdy and warm in our unforgiving winters. A covered porch ran the length of the entire building, and I outfitted both apartments with basic furniture and appliances that would stand the test of time.
That spring I began advertising for a ranch hand. I lucked out and hired a young man named Oscar, who did a great job. He was newly married to a sweet girl named Liza, and the two of them enjoyed setting up housekeeping in half the bunkhouse and working with the horses. I appreciated having a man around again. I love working my ranch, but the heavy lifting gets to be a lot for a small woman like myself.
Liza and Oscar stayed with me for almost two years before they decided to move on. They were expecting their first baby and wanted to get settled in a place of their own as their family grew. By the time they left, our herd had grown to ten horses, and I had sold several others and rented my stallions for stud service. Having "Dauntless" on a horse's pedigree came to mean quality breeding, and Dauntless horses that were also trained by Oscar and I fetched a good price.
People often called us to come out and help them with difficult animals. I dreaded those calls as they always reminded me of Tobias' death. Oscar was understanding, and nearly as good with the animals as I was, so he usually offered to take those calls.
I knew I couldn't go back to running the ranch by myself. The herd of horses was too much for one person. Between feeding, training, cleaning stalls, and everything else involved in running a ranch, I couldn't do it alone. The summer Oscar and Liza left, I hired a teenager to come stay in the bunkhouse and work. He wasn't the worker Oscar had been, but we got by until he went back to school in the fall.
That winter I handled the ranch alone. Winters are slower anyway, and by not having help I was able to sock away some additional money. I knew that as my operation continued to grow I would need more barn space, and hopefully an additional bunkhouse as well.