“The RoseBouquet”

Helmut Heinrikson had been called Mutt so long, he had forgotten how to spell his name. Mutt had worked his capricious grandfather’s sheep ranch so many years he thought it was his own. Therefore it was a huge shock to him, when his grandfather’s will was unearthed at last, and it showed some distant niece was to inherit the ranch. Mutt insisted that his grandfather had verbally promised him the ranch many times in the last ten years, but he had no way to prove it.

Mutt decided he would not be moved, but the lawyer advised him to wait until he met the niece, or his distant cousin. Maybe everything could be worked out quite amicably. The lawyer had sensed from some emails that this new rancher was a very educated or intelligent woman. She might be quite ready to let Mutt have the ranch.

Mutt was determined to defend his rights, and started plotting how to do this. In case he was forced out of his home, he prepared a second hermitage for himself up on one of the steepest mountain sides in the hinterland of the sheep ranch. He would not be driven off the land.

On Sunday mornings when his hired hand and his family went to church, Mutt drove a truck full of provisions as far as he could drive and then carried up several loads of supplies up to half-cabin, half cave tucked into a cliff-side. From there he could watch the whole sheep ranch and keep an eye on things.

The third Sunday he was still up there nesting up his secrete place, when a woman with a backpack and a sturdy walking stick in one hand, and an open book in the other came trudging by.

He hailed her and told her in no uncertain, and rather rude terms that shes did not belong here, and should get out.

“Oh, but I’m just looking for certain herbal flowers. I don’t intend to move here. I”m just passing through–”

Mutt would not hear of it. He grabbed a riffle and started down a slope with grass and rocks towards her.

The short-haired woman with a rounded fifty-ish figure got a big “O” expression on her face, and then nimbly turned and ducked behind a large rock almost as tall as she.

When Mutt twisted his foot and had to stop to favour it, she popped up and said, “My dear man! You must have been greatly wronged to be so very angry! For sure my presence here is not such a big problem. What if we sat down and had a talk about your past?”

He growled and moaned about his foot at the same time. He did not want to talk about his past with this stranger - this woman! Mutt took a step or two forward and lurched to a sitting position on the ground, leaning heavily on his rifle.

The woman crept forward with slow steps as she said, “Toss that gun aside. You don’t look like you could tolerate being a hermit in a prison. You like broad, beautiful vistas for your own self-made prison.”

Mutt growled and muttered to himself angrily. He had been taught never to swear in a woman’s presence but he could not think of anything else to say.

When she was about six or seven feet away, the woman sat down on the grass in a cross-legged way. That pained him somehow, for it was how his grandfather liked to sit. His own knees were long too stiff to try it any more.

“Hey,” the woman said cheerily, “Where’s your manners? Shouldn’t you be asking my name?”

“I won’t!” he answered bluntly.

“Let me guess at yours then. Are you Helmut Heinrikson?”

“How do you know that name? Where are you from?”

She grinned as if sharing a secret, “They warned me down in the village that if I came up this way I would run into you, and you are very protective of your land.”

For a second Mutt marveled that anyone down in the village would remember his real name, but she had said, “your land,” and that sent him off into a blast of confirmation that this was his land and he was not about to give it up to anyone else. So there!

Go to: Ruthes-SecretRoses.com/Library/S/Mutt.shtml for the rest of the story.