Well, maybe we could include a third bed in the living room area and Mike could live with us too. That might make it more a group thing with less relationship pressure on Tarah. And she could always get a place of her own built in the spring if she wanted.
A loud clanging rang out as the delivery guy unhitched the trailer from his truck then left.
And then I saw the full ingenuity of my grandmother's plan. She was giving me my freedom, ensuring I’d always be able to move on if I wanted and still have a home I could take with me anywhere I wanted to go. But the complication of having to build it would force me to stay put at least long enough to give the village time to get off the ground.
Strategic planning for the long term, with plenty of manipulative incentives thrown in for good measure. Yep, Grandma Letty was definitely a Shepherd at heart.
CHAPTER 16
Sunday, December 20th
And then it was time for the logging party to leave. I was going to take three men with logging experience to make a clearing for the houses that were due to be delivered to the village’s site in three days. Three days wasn’t a heck of a lot of time for us to make the size of clearing we’d need for four mobile homes. But we needed to get our group out of Grandma Letty’s house as quickly as we could before her neighbors started to ask questions about all her visitors. We couldn’t go on hiding the bus and keeping Bud drugged and away from his family forever.
Tarah looked worried as we said goodbye early that morning.
“Hey, it'll only be for a few days,” I said, rubbing a thumb across her lips, which were currently set in a dark scowl the likes of which I hadn’t seen since we were kids and she had to get that tetanus shot after getting hurt on a rusty nail.
“Yeah, I know.” She sighed.
Smiling, I pulled her in for a hug and a kiss on her forehead. It was nice to know she’d miss me while I was gone. “We’ll be fine. Just make sure this group doesn’t get too rowdy while I’m gone.”
She laughed. “Yeah, right. Like your grandma would let us get away with much anyways.”
We kissed goodbye, then the guys and I left.
It was an eight hour drive to Spearfish, South Dakota, made even longer when we had to drive slower due to icy roads. Just to be on the safe side, I'd gotten rid of the GPS unit, so we followed a paper map instead.
But when we got there and then found our way onto the Scenic Byway in the Black Hills National Forest, oh man, was it amazing, with steep, snowy limestone mountains towering at least a couple thousand feet above us on either side and the narrow Little Spearfish Creek winding alongside the road. Cabins dotted the mountains’ charcoal gray and tan sides here and there, easier to see now that all the icy hardwood trees were stripped of their leaves. In the spring and summer, those houses were probably hidden fairly well. But in the winter...
We’d have to be careful and try to leave as many evergreens around our village as we could for more year round coverage.
We followed the directions Grandma Letty had written out for us, passing a turnout area for tourists to view the Bridal Veil Falls and later a red brick building on the left side of the road with a large sign labeling it as the Homestead Mining Company’s Hydro Electric Plant built in 1917. Along the peaks’ ridgeline at our left, a row of electric lines on wooden poles indicated a public source of electricity to homeowners even here in the mountains, though I had a hunch maintaining those lines was probably a big enough pain to drive electricity prices sky high for anyone requiring the service. Thankfully we would be completely off the grid and able to avoid that ongoing cost for our village.
About thirteen miles along the bypass, we reached the Roughlock Falls Road, a lightly graveled and recently plowed sandy road that Grandma Letty’s map said we needed to take. The road went on forever and at first seemed way too public and popular, with the large Spearfish Canyon Lodge at the road’s beginning complete with a big, well maintained parking lot and another parking area for tourists to view the Roughlock Falls and the long metal bridge spanning it. But the farther we went along the winding single lane road, the more civilization seemed to fall away.
Even with the map, we still had a rough time finding the property. The clue to its location was the wide stone and cement bridge spanning the creek, which at this point was only five or six feet wide and looked to be about two or three feet deep at most. Then the logging started. When Grandma Letty said the area was untouched beyond the bridge, she’d meant it. So we had to start by cutting a road wide enough to let houses through. I really wasn’t happy about this part; the stone bridge plus a road would invite curious drivers down it, even with a No Trespassing sign posted. We’d have to think up a solution for it later, maybe replant some trees and teach several people how to do Mike’s cloaking spell so they could work as a group to hide both the entrance and the houses. Thankfully the snow was hard and crunchy, compacting down under my truck’s tires like a dirt road as we worked, so we didn’t have to fight getting stuck as much as I’d expected.
For all Dad’s faults, at least I could thank him for dragging Damon and me out to join loggers in the woods a couple of times a few years back. He’d intended the logging lessons to serve as nothing more than a photo op and a commercial shoot to prove he and his boys were real East Texas men in order to gain votes from the local logging industry. But the brief experience had also taught me enough to know how to handle a gas powered chainsaw safely.
And the work felt pretty good after doing nothing but riding around in a truck and planning for days. The job itself seemed pretty simple...cut a tree, then use chains and the truck to haul the tree off to the side out of the way, and repeat. The cold was crazy, though, burning my nose and throat and every inch of exposed skin until I worked hard enough to get warm. Then I started sweating inside my coat and snow pants and gloves. Still, the frigid air helped me stay sharp and alert. And it was great to be actively doing something useful for a change instead of sitting around talking. I wished we could have used some spells to get it done a lot faster. But all we could think of to use was fire, and the resulting smoke volume would have been way too much for even Mike to hide.
As I worked, I tried to imagine what the village would eventually look like. Of course, eventually spells of all kinds would probably end up getting used to design the village in the spring, either in the architectural designs of the eventual permanent buildings or in the landscaping or something. Did we have any outcasts who specialized in guiding the growth of plants? Maybe they could get creative, really help make this village look like a proper town for magic users. And did outcasts have to follow regular growing seasons like everyone else, or could we get started right away?