A Ranching guide for the Greenhorns
By Cattle Baron Schmidt.
(6 pages)
Howdy all! I write this guide for the same reason I rustle cattle about: Money. Plenty of good royalties to be had if one takes the time to put pen to paper. Still, while I can't give ALL my secrets to you as it's put me out of business, but I can't get you to buy my next book if I don't give at least the basics.
To begin with, you'll at least eighty thousand or so to purchase a deed to a ranch. Less, if you are a good talker or rather attractive.
Then, with deed in hand, find the best place for it you can find. While it cannot be within town limits, as you do NOT want people asking nosy questions on what exactly it is you are breeding, or other such moral or ethical-type dilemmas.
Once you are at the spot of choice, merely read the deed and claim your land.
-== The Joys & Perils of Breeding ==-
Good Breeding is a fine art, and is what separates us from the savages. No where more true is this rule than at a ranch.
Any animal assigned to be a "breeder" will stay on the ranch, and, in time, produce milk, eggs, shit, and other bits. And no, I am not going to try to explain how mammals will lay eggs or how exactly you milk a twenty-ton firebreathing lizard. I don't rightly try to answer those sort of questions and frankly, neither should you. Just accept the fact and move on.
Now, those items can be sold for fair coin, but the real profit is in the breeding and rightly so. This isn't a farm after all. Now, with the coming of the Etherwind, breeding has become a very simple process. Not like the old days, when you had to keep track of bloodlines, and breeding seasons, and listen to the mating howls, and the awful thumping of not one but two Twenty-ton Carnivores going at it. All. Night. Long.
But I digress. Now all you do is just assign it breeding duties, and let it be. Soon, there will be more of them. Mitosis? Magic? Again these are the questions you should not rightly ask.
Now, these... offspring, can be used in several ways, which I shall list below:
interact with it and get it to join you on your travels.
Gene Engineering with zero risk to the originals.
Profit by taking it to a slave trader if, i might add, you know where to go where no one asks any questions.
Or you can kill it and the odds of carcass being salvageable is much better than duking it out in the wild.
-== The Drydock. Waste Nothing ==-
A benefit of having a ranch is having a drydock at your disposal. Now I put mine in the southeast corner so the wind will blow the stench away from my estate. I assume it will be the same for you (you'd best hope so). In any other trade a rotten carcass would be nothing but a loss. Not so with a ranch, where nothing goes to waste. Simply dump your rotten meat into the drydock to cure, and in no time at all you'll have delicious, lightweight, adventurer-sought-after Jerky!
-== In Conclusion ==-
At this point a wise man would stop writing here, and just let you dream. Simply imagine the possabilities, and then grasp them.
In my next book, which will be soon available, I will highlight the more subtle tricks to the trade, like how exactly you prevent a twenty-ton, fire-breathing, living force of Destruction and Death from simply leaving the ranch and setting all to the flame and devouring you on the spot for asking it to sit there and breed.
Until then Partners!