It was late October in northwestern Montana, the kind of day when the sky looked thin and metallic and the mountains beyond town wore a white dusting that meant winter was already thinking ahead. Elk Ridge was one of those towns where nobody needed a newspaper because gossip got around faster than print. By noon, half the county knew that Caleb—the quiet, broad-shouldered loner living in a trailer on a struggling patch of land outside town—was digging into the hillside like a badger and stacking grass-topped slabs of earth over a timber frame.
“A grass roof,” Roy Bledsoe said, leaning back against the feed bin at the store porch. “He’s building himself a hobbit hole.”
“Nah,” another man replied. “Too ugly for a hobbit. More like a groundhog bunker.”
Laughter rolled over the porch.
Caleb heard every word as he came out of the store carrying a box of nails, a coil of wire, and a sack of beans. He kept walking.
He had learned years ago that people who laughed at a man working with his hands usually stopped laughing only when they needed something built, fixed, or saved.
Still, laughter had a way of finding old bruises.
