Page 1 of Bailey

CHAPTER

ONE

Reeves Durham pulled on his heavy denim jacket and checked the pockets for the gloves. He had them in every coat he owned, and this one also held a pair of knit gloves with leather padding on the palms and fingers. He made sure he had his phone, though he wasn’t sure who he’d call if he had a problem. He supposed there was always nine-one-one.

“Come on, fellas,” he said to his two dogs, a blue heeler named Pansy, and a boxer named Sir. He opened the back door and stepped out onto his deck, which he kept immaculately clean year-round. He’d added a roof over it when he decided to come live here permanently, and that helped a lot with keeping the snow off.

He only had to make sure the steps were clear and cross the brick path in the yard to get onto the farm. From there, Reeves used a four-wheeler to clear the paths he needed to take care of his animals.

That work was already done for today, and it hadn’t snowed in a couple of weeks now. Reeves eyed the sky, an ominous mix of blue with shifting clouds, some of which were wispy and white, and others which looked like they could drop moisture.

He’d grown up on the Canadian border, and checking the weather every morning and every evening was as natural as breathing. Though Coral Canyon sat further south than that, he also experienced wild weather swings that made Reeves glad for the habit. Today was a thirty-percent chance of moisture, and it was warm enough to be rain.

Reeves opened up the barn where he kept his smaller animals in the colder months. He’d built enclosures for his goats and his turkeys as well, and of course, he had a big, long stable for the horses and cattle. He kept all the out-buildings heated to fifty-five degrees, and that cost a pretty penny in the long winter months of Wyoming, which could last from October to May.

Reeves picked up the black bin sitting just inside the door and clipped it into place on the back of the ATV. He’d practically been born outdoors, as well as raised there, and he loved everything about mountains, pine trees, and good old-fashioned dirt. He’d built an empire on those things, and he picked up the bags and backpacks he needed to do that day’s work. He added the actual tools and pulled out his phone to get to his checklist. He’d made enough videos now to know that he always forgot something.

Honestly, that was part of the charm of his channel, but he knew better than to trifle with Mother Nature and sharp tools. Combining them required him to have his wits about him, and he needed to ensure he had all of the essential pieces. He wasn’t going camping overnight today, but he did want to show how he built a day structure for long hours out on the edges of his ranch. He only owned eleven acres, but his online viewers didn’t know that. To them, he could be dozens of miles away from civilization, food, and water. He’d been making videos now for six years, and what had started off as a fun hobby had turned into a lucrative career.

Reeves sometimes felt crushed by the pressure that came with constantly producing new content, as he didn’t always have ideas he could translate into videos. Sometimes, when he thought he had a great idea and had put together a fantastic video, it got low views. And even after all this time, Reeves was still trying to figure out the social media algorithms and get them to bend to his favor.

He pushed all that noise aside, because he hated bringing it outside with him. Those concerns were for the Reeves who edited the videos and monitored his channel, the man who responded to comments and called his best friend to brainstorm ideas.

In truth, Reeves only had one friend on this planet, and he counted himself lucky that Shane would take his call day or night.

“There you go,” he said to himself, his voice certainly not louder than the roar of the ATV’s engine. “If something happens out on the fence today, you can call Shane.”

All Shane would do, though, was call the paramedics, because he lived one thousand miles away in Juneau, Alaska.

The wind whipped across his face as Reeves navigated the half-melted, muddy roads on his ranch. He left behind the comfortable, heated buildings with all their perks, only trees and fields and fences in front of him. He went past another of his filming sites where he’d demonstrated how he’d cleared land with some of his homemade blacksmith tools. He loved spending time in his blacksmith shop, and he needed to do some brainstorming for some ideas for videos on that.

Sometimes Reeves hated being contained by walls, and he had three separate spots on his property set up for his own personal camping when he needed to get out of the house. He turned down another road leading east before he got to the one on the far fence. A stream ran through his property back there, marking the southern property line, and Reeves did his lean-to camping down there, a place he could go when he could tolerate a few walls but needed something wide open in front of him.

His open-sky camping site sat on the west side, and Reeves couldn’t wait to get back to it this summer. His winter camping videos were definitely more popular than anything else, and while Reeves didn’t mind the snow and the cold and the wind, he sure was glad he was done with that for a few months.

He drove slowly, looking left and right to check for any damage that the heavy loads of snow had caused this winter. Spring was always an extremely busy time on the ranch as he prepped for planting, moved his animals into outdoor enclosures, and had to monitor them when things got wet again.

He had to make repairs on roofs, doors, and fences, and in fact, today’s video would show him building a temporary shelter so he could stay out and work on a remote part of his ranch all day long. His stomach growled because lunchtime had come and gone, and Reeves had not eaten yet.

Part of the popularity of his videos was showing people how he could cook out in the wild. A movement of young men had given him his popularity after he’d cooked a steak on a flat river rock and eaten it with only a six-inch knife after some of his equipment had been lost when he’d slid down a hill. That video had over twenty million views, and he’d partnered with one of his viewers, who owned a T-shirt shop, to sell the apparel with his name on it and that juicy steak speared on the tip of the knife.

Reeves saw a few problems he would need to address on another day, slowing and taking pictures of each one, carefully making note of their location so he could get back to them easily. He finally arrived at his previously scoped-out project site, and he set about getting all of his camera equipment set up.

He possessed a number of switches inside himself, and as soon as he was ready, he flipped one, and the persona he adopted for his mountain man channel flared to life. He adjusted his cowboy hat and made sure his sweatshirt with that steak and knife logo was entirely visible.

“Hey, everyone,” he said, his voice hardly his own. “I’m Reeves with the Teton Mountain Man YouTube channel. Today, I’m working far away from the epicenter of my ranch, and it simply takes too much time to go back and forth for meals and supplies. I’ve brought lunch with me, and I’m going to show you how to set up a temporary shelter where you can rest and relax in between chores when you’ve got a lot of work to do far from home.

“We’re going to be fixing fences, making a delicious burger with a fried egg, constructing a temporary shelter, and enjoying all the mountain views God has to offer us. It’s kind of cloudy today, but no matter what, this is going to be a great video, so stick around for the whole thing.”

Reeves would properly cut away from that several seconds before he finished speaking and show clips as he did each of the things he’d just spoken about. The intro would come after this, and Reeves had set templates he could drag and drop clips into that made his video editing a little bit faster.

He repositioned the camera and started talking about the different types of shelters someone could build, depending on the materials they had available to them.

“This part of my ranch is still fairly wooded,” he said. “I let the animals out here in the summer as it’s prime grazing, and they love being in the shade. You can see these trees don’t have any leaves yet, though we’re moving into spring here in the Teton valleys.”

Reeves never said specifically what town he lived in, though he was sure someone could figure it out if they really wanted to. He finished building his tarp structure for the day, putting the last heavy log on the bottom, which would hold the back tarp to the ground and created a taut wall from the ground up to where he had it tied ten feet up in the trees.

He sighed as he ran around it, now talking to the second camera he’d positioned inside the shelter. “It’s so great to get out of the wind, as that’s always one thing people forget about while they’re out and about. There’s the temperature your weatherman or app says it’s going to be, and then there’s the wind chill, so it’s something you need to be careful about.