Small Town Trust

They say that possession is nine-tenths of the law.

I’m counting on that interpretation.

I’ve been shopping for a horse ever since my victim of a 4H Project-Gone-Bad bucked me off and I sold him before I got hurt.

I looked for a horse online and spread the word among friends.

Like a lot of things, the price for well-trained horses is unprecedented right now.

A 15-year-old gelding who can move cattle, work the end of a rope and doesn’t mind kids climbing up the saddle strings was advertised for $10,000.

If I bought that horse, he would die in the horse trailer before I could call the insurance company.

I’ve trained a young horse before, but I know I wouldn’t make the time to train a good horse if I tried that project now.

Then a friend forwarded an email from an acquaintance who had a mare for sale.

The horse was nearby, relatively young and just might work.

Still, I was a bit gun-shy about spending a lot of cash on an unproven pony.

So the owner offered to let me keep her for a while to test her out.

I had never borrowed a horse before.

What if she were hurt?

The owner had never lent a horse before.

If the horse got hurt, she said we would talk about it.

Seemed fair to me.

The cows are calling for the bulls so I sorted some pairs on this borrowed horse.

She’s great.

Then I went to bring my last bull home from his winter pasture.

He has a basketball-sized lump between his front legs.

The bull is healthy otherwise, travels well and the lump is a long way from the parts I need to function.

The bull was already in the trailer so I stopped by the vet clinic.

The vet diagnosed probable cancer.

I decided to buy another bull as a walking insurance policy, just in case this one tips over before he gets his one and only annual job finished.

I called a friend who raises the genetics I like.

He was out of town.

The clock was ticking.

My cows need a boyfriend now.

His bulls were munching on hay in a neighbor’s corral. I should go look at the bulls without my friend.

I called the neighbor.

He would not be at home, but he understood my urgency.

Go ahead and load one up if I wanted.

So I drove to my neighbor’s, looked at bulls that didn’t belong to him, loaded one into my trailer and drove to the vet.

I told the vet to charge the semen test to the bull’s owner.

When the bull passed the semen test, I branded him with my ownership and turned the bull into my pasture.

All of this with three phone calls, but without a dime passing through my fingers.

Meanwhile, my aunt from Mississippi is visiting Conrad for the summer and needed to buy a car.

While I was acquiring livestock with a no money down, she was being hassled by a Great Falls auto dealership that does business in four states.

The harassment never ceased.

They needed one document after another, even after she drove the car off their lot.

When she discovered the air conditioning didn’t work, the dealership would not even take a peek, much less fix it.

Fortunately, the local mechanic squeezed her in and discovered a filthy filter -- a cheap, easy fix that would have bought lots of goodwill if the dealership had bothered to check.

Our experiences doing business are on polar opposite ends of the rural-urban trust spectrum.

I’ll take rural.