"It couldn't have been better," she says. "Each generation that's had a part in this life feels privileged."

Three decades later, a large print hangs on the wall of her Western-style chalet near a mounted buck's head and a bear skin. In "The Privileged Few," a cowboy picks sticks from his saddle blanket as the Rogue Valley stretches behind man and horse, the very scene the little girl saw.

Schleigh, 42, lives with her husband and son on a ranch carved out of land that's been in her family since just after the Civil War. Her art seeks to tell the story of that life.

A special open house for two of her artworks is planned for Nov. 27 at the Lake Creek Store and Cafe. An oil painting called "A New Son Rising" and a drawing called "Who Needs Nintendo?" are headed for the C.M Russell Auction in Great Falls, Mont., the biggest event on the Western art circuit. As she draws a bead on the world of big-time Western art, there's nothing shaky about her aim.

"I'm going to kick butt," she says.

If you ask folks around here, she already does.

"She does beautiful work," says Ken Duncan at the Lake Creek Store. "Everybody's crazy about it."

As a kid Schleigh was always drawing. She grew up on the next spread over, where they still run cattle. But by the time she went to Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, she'd become interested in cattle and put artsy things behind her. She spent her 20s and 30s cowboying, running cattle between Fort Klamath and Willows and Red Bluff, Calif., living in a 30-foot trailer the Schleighs called "the war wagon."

Today, drawers from the war wagon are built into the kitchen cabinets her husband made from timber on their land. They built the house -- she says it's a work in progress -- eight years ago, far from power and telephone lines and equipped with a generator.

Schleigh had little formal training, although she did study with Western artist David Bjurstrom.

She had a work accepted into the Russell auction last year, no mean feat itself. The year before she did a painting that was turned down by the Russell people but took second place for oils at the Phippen show in Prescott, Ariz., another big show. The original of "The Privileged Few" sold at the National Western Art Show in Ellensburg, Wash., for $1,400.

Although she sometimes enlists her husband or 10-year-old son as models, she doesn't paint directly from life.

"I have 100 ideas," she says. "There's always something that's eating to get done. They aren't things I've seen. They're a little from this, a little from that."

She once thought all the years she spent cowboying were wasted.

"But now I think it's an opportunity I'll never get again," she says.

She figures she's learned a lot about the Western art game the past few years, including the kind of subject matter judges and the public like: animals, little kids. If you can win at the Russell, it generates a buzz around your work.

Unlike armchair cowboy artists, Schleigh knows what's what and where it goes. She chuckles at cowboy art in which a rope will take off and not end anywhere, just go off into thin air. Or a guy who's famous for pictures of cowboy boots and spurs -- "but he always has them on the wrong feet and upside down."

A Schleigh cartoon shows Gary Larson-style cows standing on each other's shoulders so the top one can saw off a tree limb that's home to a northern spotted owl. Another shows angler cattle that have gone fishing and caught their limit of endangered suckers.

The cartoons reflect the threat she feels from what she says is an agenda to get cattle off the range. If she has an agenda, it's telling a story of a way of life.