I Had 47 Days to Win $60,000 or Lose My Ranch. The Only Thing I Was Ever Good At Was Shearing Sheep, So I Flew to New Zealand to Beat the Best in the World

The small issue was tax.

Foreign winners had their prize held for withholding until the paperwork cleared between the two countries’ tax offices. Usually six to eight weeks. Sometimes longer.

April 1st was twenty-five days away.

I sat on the back steps of the shearing shed in the dark, with the trophy beside me, and laughed. I didn’t know what else to do. I’d done the impossible thing, and I was going to lose the ranch over paperwork.

Rewi sat down next to me.

“What’s the number?” he asked.

“Forty-one thousand. Dollars. American.”

He nodded slowly.

Then he went back inside.

I found out later what he did. He went from table to table in that shearing shed. Shearers. Farmers. Wool buyers. Sponsors. The men I’d beaten that afternoon. He told them about the hospital bill, the bank, the four generations, the date.

The sponsor who’d given me the bad news wrote a check for the prize as an “advance,” personally, against the money the company would get back from the tax office. The New Zealand shearing association added a donation. The man who finished second, a giant from Gisborne named Hemi, emptied his wallet into Rewi’s hat and said, “Tell him to come back next year so I can beat him properly.”

The wire landed in my bank in Alturas on March 28th.

I paid off the loan on the 29th.

My mother hung the trophy in the kitchen, over the stove, where it gets greasy and she doesn’t care.

I invited Rewi to Modoc County for the spring shearing. He came in May with his wife and three grandchildren. He looked at my land, the sagebrush, the sky, the snow on the Warners, my four generations of sheep.

“Now I understand,” he said.

“Understand what?”

“Why you sheared like that,” he said. “You weren’t shearing for money, Yank. You were shearing for this.”

He was right.

Next March, I’m going back to Masterton.

Hemi says he’s been practicing.

So have I.