Those dreams had once felt solid in his mind, the way a house already seems real to a builder before the first wall ever goes up. Aean's death did not erase those dreams completely. It did something worse. It drained the weight from them. The shape remained, but the reason for building any of it disappeared.
For years afterward, the plans still drifted somewhere behind Ran's eyes, but he could never find enough purpose to reach for them again. Eventually, he found the land. 160 acres of mixed pine and open grass below a long mesa. There was dependable spring water, enough grazing for horses, and an old cabin left behind by a trapper who had possessed enough common sense to build with timber instead of adobe. Ran filed the claim.
He patched the roof, stretched fence across the rough ground, repaired what could be repaired, and slowly made the place into something small, quiet, and undeniably his. He had a good hand with horses. He spent money carefully, and when trouble could not be avoided, he knew his way around a rifle. Mostly, though, Ran kept to himself. It was not because he hated people.
He simply had very little left that he trusted himself to care about. Nearly everyone who had mattered most to him was already beneath the ground, and he still had no idea what a man was supposed to put into the empty places they left behind. There were weeks when the only living creatures Ran spoke to were his horses. He cooked plain meals and rarely cared whether they tasted worth eating. He kept the cabin clean because his mother, Adeline Treadwell, had always kept a clean house, and some habits were hammered into a man too deeply to disappear just because nobody was there to notice them anymore.
But Ran never hung the sort of curtain Adeline would have put over the window. He never laid a woven mat beside the door. He kept the place orderly, but he never made it warm. Most evenings he ate at one end of a table built for two people. His nearest neighbor lived 11 mi south, a weathered man named Marin Halcott, who kept a few head of cattle, and ran a small trading post where a traveler could buy flour, ammunition, salt, and not much else.
Ran and Marin knew each other well enough to exchange a few words when their paths crossed, but neither man made a habit of visiting the other. During the first cold months of the year, Ran ran a modest trap line. Marten mostly, sometimes fox, now and then a beaver along the creeks. He sold the hides at Marin Halcott's trading post, and the extra dollars helped carry him through the lean stretch of winter when the ranch itself brought in almost nothing. Ran was particular about how he set his traps.