Chapter 3: Chapter 3: The McCallister Problem

I spend the next two days in a state of controlled panic. The financial situation is worse than Granddaddy let on. I go through the ranch books—actual books, because Granddaddy still does his accounting in ledgers like it's 1987—and what I find makes my stomach drop. Total shortfall: closer to four hundred thousand dollars, not three. "We're not just in trouble," I mutter, surrounded by papers at my kitchen table. "We're circling the drain." But the ideas are there. Heritage beef—grass-fed, hormone-free, the kind of stuff that farm-to-table restaurants in Austin pay top dollar for. Agritourism—ranch tours, chuck wagon dinners. Grant money from the state. The pieces are there. But every plan hits the same wall. I need more land. Three hundred acres isn't enough to make the economics work. I need at least five hundred. And there's only one ranch within a mile of our property line with the kind of grazing land that could make this viable. The McCallister place. Five hundred acres of prime Hill Country. Best grass in the county. Solid water rights. And a forty-year feud between our families that's so old and so deep that most people have forgotten what started it. I find Doc Patterson—our veterinarian, seventy-one years old, bowlegged as a parenthesis—at his office on Main Street and lay it all out. Doc listens without interrupting, which is more than most people do. "What you need," he says slowly, "is to stop thinking like a commodity rancher and start thinking like a brand. Heritage beef. Grass-fed, pasture-raised. There's a market for it—big market. But you need five hundred acres to make the numbers work." "The McCallister place." "There's five hundred acres of good grazing land within a mile of your property line. Problem is, Jack McCallister died two months ago. His grandson…