Delilah submitted the 14 years of courtesy receipts to ODOT that morning. The state denied Corrine’s petition 48 hours later, adding a polite suggestion that the HOA should understand property law before wasting the state’s time.
We had won the procedural fight. But Corrine still thought she could bleed me out in civil court with her husband’s money.
She didn’t know about the promise my grandfather wrote in his Bible in 1932.
I sat Wyatt down at the kitchen table. I told him about the Wallowa Homeland Project, a non-profit partnering with the Nez Perce tribe to return ancestral lands. For eighteen months, the tribe had been looking for a contiguous parcel of high meadow large enough to run a bison herd and host a youth cultural camp.
They needed 2,000 acres. They had federal grant funding waiting.
“Our ranch is 2,300 acres,” I told my son. “I’ll keep 40 acres around the house as a life estate. I’m selling the rest to the tribe.”
