text: [Themes: sci-fi]
  
  You"ll need to guide them to the claim, but you were going that way to hunt and prospect anyway.
  
  "I'll show you to the claim before we try to settle on a price. That way you know I'm not trying to pull one over on you."
  
  The craggy grey haired man stands up and offers a hand to shake, which you take.
  
  "David Mason."
  
  "Arthur Donaldson."
  
  "It's a deal mister Donaldson. Would you be willing to guide us there in the morning?"
  
  "I can do that. I'll meet you here at Daybreak mister Mason."
  
  You crash like a stone into your cot barely taking notice of the changes in your cabin before going to sleep. The next morning you take a small band of miners out to you claim. The walk goes slower than before and it almost takes a full weeks to get them there. They had brought a cart for supplies and to bring some of the ore back. This means you lead them along a wider path than the one you took before and the party needs to stop occasionally to move a fallen tree or break a boulder. You manage to lead them to the draw without any injuries and show them to the hemetite that you've found.
  
  "Well that's a fair seem mister Donaldson. I'll give you two thousand scrip for it."
  
  "I'll take that deal mister Mason."
  
  The two of you shake on the deal and the pieces of paper are given to you. You find yourself returning back to the settlement in a long slow way to pick up a few more furs before summer sets in. You'll need to find a place to build a homestead soon. At least where you can keep some of your belongings and plant a field or two. You won't live long in this place without something to eat besides meat, and forage.
  
  The question is where do you want to do this. Sure you have the cabin in town, but a real house would be preferable to a little five by twenty room. You could at least get a five by twenty room to yourself. Maybe you could try to get yourself a home in town or on the outskirts of it. Then again as a hunter setting up somewhere in the wilderness might be better. It'd be nice to have some place to keep furs before bringing them into town. The town will be safer though. You haven't had a run in with any of the Indigs yet. You don't know if anyone has just yet. They still might be hostile or friendly, or maybe just opportunists.
  
  > build a home in the wilderness.
  You won't need to use any of you money for land out in the wilderness. You spend some money on a few tools and a mule then make your way out into the hills.
  
  You pick a spot in the middle of the woods on a hill that would be near the path. It takes you a good bit longer to build this cabin by yourself. You also prepare a garden behind your home and pick a relatively flat area to plant corn. You figure that you can sell any extra food to the miners if the mine you sold takes off.
  
  You set to work building your cabin and getting firewood ready before you break ground. Once the ground thaws you set to planting anything you think might grow.
  
  > Continue
  You spend the rest of your life in those hills. To your surprise there are only a few hours of night during the summer, and while that's extremely irritating for your sleep cycle, it's great for your vegetable garden,.The Vegetables in your garden grow to absurd sizes. It's more than what you can eat and keep in your root cellar so you end up selling to Mr. Mason's miners up the mountain and actually make a decent amount of coin. The corn you grow is also more than enough for the needs of yourself and your mule.
  
  Come winter the coats of the animals in the wilds thickens again and you go back into the fur trade. When the spring thaw comes you start all of this over again. Every year there are different miners on the mountain, so you never get to know any of them well. You get called back to the settlement, which come to find out was named Godbole's respite at first landing. You work as a common laborer building some sort of castle, lighthouse combination.
  
  When your three years pass you decide to stay right where you are. You have a bunch of coin built up at this time, you've dug a well, and you've cleared more land around your home to the limits of what you can maintain on your own. After five years war comes. It never affects you. The Georgian government decided that your little settlement in the wilds wasn't paying proper taxes or some such. The war never reached your hill. The Georgian navy spent a while bombarding Godbole castle, but gave up on that plan when the castle shot back with larger cannons. So they sent the army in who managed to take the settlement but where destroyed by the Frontsmen in the wilds. The Georgian army carried muskets that ranged to fifty meters instead of proper Frontsman rlfles that were accurate up to three hundred meters. The Georgians eventually retreated and your part in the war consisted of doing what you've been doing. Growing and selling food and sending furs come winter. That was the closest things came to excitement for you. You never heard from the Singhs after that. You were never able to find out what happened to them either.
  
  After twenty years you caught a cough you couldn't shake one winter. It got worse and worse until one day that spring you went to bed and never got back up. Treasure hunters spent years trying to figure out where you hid away all of your coin. It wasn't until forty years later that a new immigrant family moved in that it was found. A Henry Thatcher aged thirty one found it when he tried to replace the wellhead and found that the thick log that the well rope wrapped around was heavier than it should be and turned out to be hollow. You unintentionally saved a family from starvation and left them with medicine to save one of their sick children forty years after you passed. It was your eighty third birthday, which was known to no one but that family decided that you were a friendly ghost to them.