I did not wave. I got in my truck and set down on the seat the thick folder I had spent a year putting together, and I drove into Casper, straight to the office of the state brand inspector.
Because a smile is a cheap thing, and while I was smiling and waving at that man every morning, I was building the one thing he never counted on the beaten old neighbor to have. A record. A careful, dated, dead-serious record of everything he did to me.
When my good cow died wrong, I did not just bury her and grieve. I called a veterinarian out and paid for a proper necropsy, and the report came back plain, a poison no pasture makes on its own. When gates kept turning up open, I put trail cameras where no man would think to look, and I caught his hired hand on film, dated and clear, walking my fence line and standing over my stock tank in the dark. And when he choked off my water, I went down to the water district and pulled every record of who filed what and when, and the paper showed his diversion for exactly the illegal thing it was.
A year of it. Every open gate, every sick animal, every dirty trick, logged and photographed and filed while I waved and let him think I was folding.
The brand inspector went through that folder slow, page by page, and his face got harder the deeper he read. Poisoning another man livestock is not a squabble between neighbors out here. It is a crime, an old and serious one, and the state does not smile about it. They opened a case that same week.
His hired hand, once the law came knocking, did not go down alone. He told them who paid him and what he was told to do. The water district moved to set my rights back where they belonged. And the rich man who bought up half the county learned that the one spread he could not buy or break was the one held by a stubborn old man who kept receipts.
His big plan to consolidate everything into one grand operation stalled out right in the middle, on my forty acres of grass and water, and there it sits to this day. The kingdom he was so sure he had won has a hole in the middle the exact shape of my ranch.
I still ride my land near Casper every morning. My cattle drink from my water. And when I pass that man on the road now, I do not wave, and neither does he, and that suits me fine. Fifty years I bled into this ground, and no amount of money was ever going to take it from me, so long as I kept my head down and my records straight.