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Page 128

| up and her eyes were alert. Sasha had to wonder if Lightning might one day decide to return to the wild and become a hunter of sheep. |

| Riding onward, her backside sore from being in the saddle so long, Sasha sighed. Then her eyes widened in disbelief when she found herself riding beside a six-foot-high fence which ambled into the distance. At least four hundred beautiful Merino sheep grazed peacefully within its safe confines. |

| She had heard about the outback's millions of rolling acres that were covered in box, a shrub whose thirsty roots pulled every drop of surface moisture out of the soil and prevented the grass from growing. The solution for the graziers was ringbarking. This killed the box without using up extra labor felling it and grubbing out the tree stumps. Grass then sprouted in abundance on these spectral landscapes of gesticulating, claw-white dead box branches, the sort that Sasha could see now and then across the pasture land that was spread out before her. |

| She nudged her horse with her knees and rode up next to Ashton. "Ashton, we are most certainly not the first to arrive here," she said, tipping her wide-brimmed hat back from her brow with a finger. "Will we settle close by? Will these squatters be our neighbors?" |

| Ashton looked at her with a strange sort of gleam in his eyes. "Yes to both of your questions," he said, resting a hand on his saddle horn. "What do you say we go and give these folks a hello right now? Let's see just what sort of neighbors we are going to have to deal with." |

| An anxiousness stirred within Sasha to think that |

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