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She nodded, biting her lip as if she couldn’t believe the animals would be eaten one day. But that’s what they did here. From gate to plate. And if Brutus was ever to start doing his business, then he’d have a new line—from conception to consumption. But maybe now wasn’t the time to focus on that. “We also have sheep, chickens, and horses.”
“A real farm.”
Ranch, but whatever.
“That must’ve been fun growing up.”
“Yeah.” That was the short answer. Long answer was that ranching was a lot of hard work. Constant hard work, especially for his mom. Maybe there was a reason his brothers had all left.
A faint howl echoed across the valley. She shivered and moved a little closer to him. “Call me crazy, but that sounded like a wolf.”
“You’re not crazy.”
“It was? You get wolves around here?”
“Occasionally. We see more coyotes.”
Her eyes widened behind her sunglasses. “I thought wolves were extinct.”
“They almost were, but they’ve been reintroduced. There are several packs across east Washington. We sometimes hear them at night.”
She rubbed her upper arms. “Aren’t they a threat to your animals?”
He shrugged, his lips tweaking wryly. “It’s still illegal to hunt them.”
“So what can you do?”
“Electric fencing. Making sure our fences are maintained.”
“Electric fencing must be expensive.” Her brow knit, like she cared.
“Yeah. We combine it with turbo-fladry, which they’re reluctant to cross, so they get conditioned to staying away.”
“What’s turbo-fladry?”
“It’s a string of red or orange cloth flags hung at eighteen-inch intervals along a fence.”
“That works?”
“Seems to so far. We also sometimes use fox lights, which simulate a flashlight moving around.” One of the coolest inventions he’d come across. “But our best method of protection involves riding the boundaries, checking on the stock, making sure there’s nothing to attract them. Wolves are scavengers. If they get a whiff of a dead carcass, they’ll hunt for more. So we have to be careful.” He’d once seen a pit where wily wolves had dug through several feet of dirt to ravage the remains of a dead bull. It hadn’t been pretty.
She shivered. “Have you ever been attacked?”
“No. And it’s unlikely. They don’t tend to attack humans.”
“But sometimes they do. We see it in the news.”
He shrugged. “The advice is the same as for bears. Stand up tall, use a big voice, and back away slowly.”
“I hope I don’t ever come across a wolf.”
“You’re unlikely to, especially living so near town. And even less likely when you go back to Australia.”
What were her future plans? Did she hope to stay?
“I’m not sure when that will be, especially with my family being here.”
“What about work?”
