Chapter 475: Looking For Work, Again

“Huh? Sue yourself?” the woman said, looking confused.

I answered, “You said that if I hurt myself, the company’s worker’s comp insurance won’t cover it. I had to sue the company to get some money for the injury, but I would lose because of how good Paula is as a lawyer. I just asked if I could even sue myself.”

“You are not making any sense,” the woman said.

“Beth,” the man that said I was a swordsmith said. “This is David Jones, the same one that owns this company. If he wants to carry half-ton hay bales on his farm, that is his problem.”

“Until my boy found a woman would have him, he spent his money on swords and armor for those medieval fairs where they fight like knights,” he said to me, “I think your problem is that you are using too small of a blade and working in a confined space. I watched you cutting. I happened to have a sword in my office. If you can get an edge on it, I’ll get the guys to move you a cow carcass where you can have the space to slice, dice, mince, and maul.”

He went and got the sword from his office. It was beaten to hell and back but was made well enough to hold together. Ten minutes on the bench grinder had a decent edge on it. They moved the carcass over to an area that gave me ten feet of space between it and the nearest object. I got a good feel for the sword’s weight and then had my implant map out the places I needed to cut. They placed a large plastic sheet over the floor and told me to see what I could do now.

Nothing was as simple as a straight cut through an area. With my implant, I figured out how to do it on one side. I got a feel for how to do it on the other side. Some of the pieces of meat were still hitting the floor when I stepped back.

“Daddy?” I heard Ellen ask. “One of the people Molly has building stuff broke the water pipe to the school. When did you get a helicopter? They flew me here in one they said is yours. Can I butcher some cows? I brought my knives. I have my suit on under my clothes.”

“Sure, but you are going to get hosed off before we go anywhere else,” I told her.

Ellen handed me her clothes. To keep people from discovering her hidden knives, someone made Ellen a set of sheathes made into her “catsuit” she wore to hunt.

The people here didn’t know what to make of her.

I watched as Ellen headed into the room where six cows were awaiting their fate. Like a little Ninja, she moved from cow to cow. Ellen hit the cow in the head with something where the farm shoots the bolt gun, and then Ellen cuts its neck before the cow hits the floor. She didn’t get any of the blood on her.

Ellen then moved inside, where a cow that had been in the chute was hanging up to have its throat cut to bleed out. She did the same thing there.

When she reached where three had finished bleeding out but needed skinning, Ellen made the same cuts I had around the hooves. She did a much better job than me on the hide.

There was no meat on the inside of the hide that I could see.

“Daddy, could you get the hides off them now? They are a bit too heavy for me still,” Ellen asked.

She quickly had the meat in the cart they used for the beef going to be wet-aged. Ellen moved the other bins under the cow, where she cut loose the different chunks of meat. After six more, Ellen went off somewhere. She came back with wet hair wearing only panties. Ellen dressed and climbed up into a nook on the edge of what had once been a hayloft. When Ellen had gotten herself wedged into place and as small as she could make herself, she was asleep.

“Looks like you are washing the blood from the holding pen,” the man that knew I was a swordsmith said. “Your kid made the mess.”

“But this is my company, so why do I have to clean up her mess,” I asked as I pulled the high-pressure hose into the holding pen.

Unlike where they stunned the cows with the bolt gun, bled them out, and drained the blood, the holding pen didn’t have tile on the floor. It was concrete, like in the areas with the automatic milking machines.

The older man that had been taking me around said, “Beth, don’t even get to get started. She may be a tiny thing, but she grabbed that eight-pound pick-ax and slammed it into the cow’s brain as if she used a bolt gun. I have no clue how she could be so damn precise, but she obliterated the brain stem and ripped the vertebrae from the skull with that hit. I checked. There wasn’t anything left inside that I could identify as brain matter. I’m not sure the heart tried to beat more than a few times after she cut the cow’s throat.”

“David, I must say I’m sorry for doubting your word. If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it. Never seen a little girl that doesn’t bat an eye at the sign of blood and guts,” the guy that showed me around said. “Where’d you buy her that set of knives? She never once sharpened them, but all her cuts were clean like she just honed them before each cut.”

“Beats me. The knives were a gift to Ellen. I haven’t checked the sheaths to see if they have a built-in sharpener. I’ve looked at them a few times, and I think whoever made them used some advanced material. The blades are too thin to hold up to that kind of use otherwise,” I explained.

I then gave them a short version of how Ellen survived two years alone at the RV park.

“Maybe when she wakes up, your girl can find out what is attacking the sheep and cattle. Looks like wild dogs, but haven’t seen any signs of those around,” he said.

Ellen piped up from her sleeping spot and said, “Quit killing the coyotes. You cause new ones to take over the dead one’s territory. Dump some scraps and long bones on the small island in the creek outside the fence line. Check them out around noon tomorrow. You will have some good tracks to tell you about the predators around here. I’ll go look to see what I find after my nap.”

I ended up in the farm’s office as Beth went over how some things worked on the business side.

The man that brought me the sword to try took me for a walk around the farm. We decided that being a butcher was probably not my best choice to keep busy.

“Sir? A girl gave me these and said to find the guy carrying the hay bales. She said her suit smelled cow blood and couldn’t use it. The girl ran off naked except for knives in sheaths strapped around her ankles,” a man said, carrying all of Ellen’s clothes plus her catsuit.

I laughed before saying, “She is going to get hosed off now whether she likes it or not. Ellen has a body odor now, so she will go roll in shit to cover the smell. I won’t be scrubbing her back and hair.”

We made all sorts of jokes and comments about the things their kids have done. I added some of what April did that were off the wall. About an hour later, Ellen came up riding bareback on a stallion. She had him jump the fence and then come to a stop beside us.

With puppy dog eyes, Ellen asked, “Can I keep him? I checked him all over, and he has no markings. Only one of the horses out of the group had any marks on them. She had one that matched those on the farm. I think she got out through the broken section of the fence someone repaired recently. It has shiny wire where the other parts are dull. So, can I keep him? Please? My dad showed me about horses. This one is only around three, given his teeth and nutsack size.”

“I don’t know, Ellen,” I told her. “I know people can adopt wild horses if they can prove they have the resources to take care of them.”

The two men with me went to check the horse over. The horse wasn’t happy about the men getting near him but having Ellen on his back seemed to calm him down enough to let them look for markings. He used a chip scanner and found nothing.

“Beth called her friend over at the Bureau of Land Management. It seems they have been paying an incentive to get people to adopt untitled wild horses. If Ellen can get the herd of wild horses into one of our pastures, we can corral them there and have the BLM agent come out to check them over. The program only allows up to four horses per person under the paid adoption program. They’ve complained about a group of wild horses in this area. Those Ellen found sounds like the same group,” he told us.

The man I found was the ranch foreman, told Ellen, “If you think you can get them into one of our pastures, there is a gate only three hundred yards down from where we repaired the fence. That fence is six feet high and should keep them there. I’ll take your dad down with two of the large hay bales to put out for them to eat. There is a stream running right through there for water.”

“How much land do I even own here,” I asked.

“The farm sits on around twenty-four-thousand acres. We only have ten thousand fenced-in for pasture right now. Our previous owner used fourteen thousand acres to rotate between growing corn, cotton, soybeans, wheat, hay, sod, and timber. No more than eight thousand acres got planted with crops at one time. The rest was left fallow, used to cut hay, or planted with fir trees to sell as Christmas Trees,” he explained.

Instead of going back the way she came, Ellen headed off to ride around the fence line to get to where the other wild horses were. She seemed totally at peace being nude to ride bareback on the horse. We all watched Ellen until she disappeared over the hill.

I loaded two giant hay bales on the trailer connected to a tractor. It was my job to open and close the gates as we came to them. Ellen was there with around twenty horses and seven foals, all still sucklings. She went to check over each horse. The stallion was beside her, except when he went to mount one of the three mares in heat.

The foreman explained that it was odd for the mares to be in heat this time of year because that would mean having a foal in late fall or early winter when they were less likely to survive.

They were receptive to being mounted.

The horses shied away when the foreman went over to check them out. He seemed a bit uncomfortable having the naked Ellen beside him, but that was the only way he could get near the horses.

The mares in heat are having the stallion mount them anytime the foreman gets close.

“Found the bitch,” Ellen said before taking off at a run toward the back fence.

Ellen dove through the barbed wire and headed off toward the woods. We heard growling, coyote yipping, a yip in pain, nothing. Ten minutes later, Ellen came out covered in shit and blood, pulling something behind. She skinned it, washed the hide, and then herself. Except for the stallion, who stayed by the fence waiting for her, the other horses moved away from her.

“Somebody lost a woyote,” she said.

“Don’t you mean a coyote, Ellen,” the foreman asked.

“No, sir, this is a woyote. It is a hybrid of a wolf and a coyote. Someone bred this one a few times already. Found a den with a litter of nine, but they weren’t hers. They were feeding on two female coyote carcasses. That bitch woyote has killed off all the other pups and the alpha male. Found three dead deer rotting away without any signs of more than her taking a small bit of meat off one of them. You don’t have to worry about there being a big cat in the woods right now. She killed it and fed on it sometime in the last two days. I can’t tell if the big cat attacked any cows or sheep, but this bitch has. I saw her watching me earlier when I found the horses. I almost got her. The cougar must have been sick because this woyote wasn’t all that fast, Ellen told them. “Be right back.”

She had a tail and what amounted to coyote overalls when she came back.

Ellen had found another of the female coyotes that the woyote killed. She skinned and cut it so that only the top three inches of the hind legs remained. The fur from the belly and back were intact, but she cut out the front legs. Ellen had the skin from the head cut so that it, effectively, became a hood. The fur from the coyote’s ass and pussy, combined with Ellen’s hair, covered her up between the legs.

“Sorry, sir,” Ellen said to the farm foreman. “I keep forgetting that I have hair down there now and that it turns boys and men on when they see it. I know you don’t want to do me. Plus, I started to get a bit cold. When I was eight, my dad showed me how to skin a wolf. I was much smaller then. We didn’t have to cut the front legs off. I could even go to the bathroom without having to take it off. David is my daddy and got someone to make me the bodysuit I wore earlier. Cow blood stinks, and the smell wouldn’t wash out.”

The stallion kept his distance from all of us, especially Ellen. He wouldn’t move away from her when she came to him. When she walked away, he moved back over near the mares. The horses didn’t seem skittish around me after I placed one of the hay bales over near the creek. The farm’s mare followed us into that pasture when we opened the gate, but the wild horses remained.

Ellen got some strange looks when we returned to the foreman’s office. She did ask someone how to care for the mare that got out of the break in the fence. About five minutes later, Ellen came back to ask for her clothes. The coyote smell was spooking the other animals. She handed me the coyote skin in a heat-sealed plastic bag.

We did get to spend time watching the automatic milking operation. It didn’t make Ellen happy when I told her that she couldn’t get some chickens to take home for the cook. They did give us ten-dozen fresh eggs.

“Ellen, we will have to work on you stripping and going off to hunt like that. You need to start carrying around a backpack or bag with a spare of your catsuits, or you won’t be able to go,” I told her on the drive home. “You about killed that foreman as you got off the horse. He saw more pink than a man his age should see from a girl or woman. I am glad you noticed why he was uncomfortable and went to take care of it. I was not so sure skinning a coyote corpse and making a jumpsuit was the best idea, but it was cute to me. I suggest that you figure out how to wash that well and put something in the crotch if you don’t wear underwear under it. The light wasn’t good enough for the foreman to see that only your hair hid your pussy and the tail covering your butthole. It didn’t hide as much as you think.”

“Hey! It hid more than my being naked,” Ellen snarled.

That is the first time she has gotten mad at me. She won’t even talk to me now.

I let her have the silence.

Maybe thirty minutes from home, she asked, “Daddy? Why am I so cranky all the time? I could have knocked that woyote out, tied it up, and called someone to take it somewhere else. I was so angry and took it out on her. Daddy, she was scared when I got close enough for her to smell that I was mad. I don’t feel bad about killing her because she would have moved closer to the barn and likely hurt someone. Hunting has always calmed me, and today when I was tracking her, it didn’t. I shouldn’t have gotten mad at you, but I did. We’ve always been able to talk and not get mad at each other. I’ve yelled at Tee many times recently, and it wasn’t for any reason I can remember.”

“Ellen, sweetheart, you are becoming a woman,” I said as I reached back to put my hand on her knee. “Your body is full of raging hormones that change your body and your brain too. While other boys may not get it, Tee does. Dee’s been biting his head off a lot too. Not that it doesn’t hurt him when she does it, but he understands. Camden and Bambi were the same when they hit puberty. Just hug him from time to time and thank him for being a good friend. He will never love you as much as Dee, but he does love you like a sister.”

“I don’t like it, daddy,” Ellen said.