The Winter Courtship Rituals of Fur-Bearing Critters Read Free

other corner of the store.”
    “Sweeps?” Oh, Ariadne had the woman now. The woman was a tourist—and probably one of the last of the season, before the snows. After the tourists went, it was all about working to build the stock and selling to the town regulars until the skiers arrived, and when the snow got too deep to travel, it was all about Internet sales, designing new stock, and dreaming of spring until the tourists returned around May.
    The thing about tourists who bought yarn was that they tended to buy a lot of it. Crawford’s mill—Craw-Daddy ’Paca—sold to small yarn stores (known in the trade as the LYS—or Local Yarn Store) around the country, but a yarn connoisseur wouldn’t always be able to get hold of his stock, even on the Internet. And the Sweeps and Experimentals were always one-of-a-kind items. The Sweeps were mystery fiber, usually the actual sweepings from the mill floor after a number of dyed fleeces had been carded and spun. The results were bizarre, odd, and sometimes oddly beautiful. The Experimentalswere whatever Crawford and Ariadne felt like coming up with when they were hand-spinning. Of course marketing was always a consideration, but sometimes, they simply put together the rovings that moved them to see what they got.
    “Yeah,” Ariadne said, standing up from behind the counter in a swirl of multi-colored skirts and a hand-knit wool/alpaca cardigan, all done in purple, gold, and brown. “Here, let me show you.”
    Crawford rolled his eyes at her, because she was such a ham, and she wiggled black eyebrows over warm brown eyes and a slightly Roman nose. Ariadne wasn’t a beauty—had never pretended to be one—but she was one of the happiest women Crawford had ever known. Her husband, Rory, was an artist who sold in one of the tourist traps in Grand Lakes, a town just down the road, but Ariadne had always preferred fiber arts herself. She said she could understand going to all that trouble for something if it was practical, but she didn’t have the patience for something going on the wall. Crawford had always felt that way as well. He’d learned to knit at his grandmother’s knee and had inherited the sheep property from his father. He hadn’t had the stomach for eating the critters but had loved the idea of the process, from first to last. The mill had been his dream since business school in college, and he’d made it come true one small investment at a time.
    He’d lucked into Ariadne about ten years ago. She’d been young, just out of college, and unemployed. She’d taken his sign for help wanted at its word, and he hadn’t said one thing about her being a little small for the work. She’d toughed out the grueling physical labor with the mill, listened when he’d explained plant-dyeing techniques, and learned how to spin and knit right alongside him. In the meantime she’d gone from a defensive kid with a butch haircut, ripped jeans, and an eyebrow ring, to a woman comfortable in her own skirts—and an eyebrow ring.
    And still desperately in love with her husband.
    It was the one thing Crawford really envied about her, but he could forgive that because she was really his dearest friend.
    The customer left with nearly three hundred dollars worth of Crawford’s most fanciful colored wool, and Ariadne sighed and collapsed into the padded office chair next to Crawford’s spinning wheel and stool. While she’d been schmoozing, Crawford had, aided by the moaning kerchunk kerchunk kerchunk of the giant drum carder, established a treadle rhythm and begun spinning a big fluffy rust-brown batt of alpaca/merino into a thin ply of yarn. He thought this sort of robust color might call for a thicker yarn, so he made plans to ply the singles a couple of times until it was heavy worsted weight. He had an idea for it, but he didn’t want to put a voice to it.
    “So, boss—do I get my bonus?” Ariadne teased, pushing her slender arms over her head and arching into a stretch.