AFTERWORD

Three years have passed since that best of all buffalo dinners in the old kitchen of the ranch house. In many ways, things are the same. This morning Erney and Moose-Ann are squirreled away in Erney’s cabin with fly-tying material strewn over every surface and reruns of M*A*S*H blaring too loud from the TV. I sit in front of my word processor in the same room I have worked in for twentyfive years. But there have been changes. Jill and I have taken our relationship to the next level. Jilian and she have moved in and there is more laughter, more passionate conversation, more life. There is a basketball hoop bolted to the front of the shop. The kitchen has been remodeled to accommodate Jill’s catering business, and things have never been so clean and orderly. On the ridge where coyotes still slip silently through cold nights, the herd stands in the first light as if they have always been there, as much a part of the landscape as the waving bluestem, the sculpted rock outcroppings, and the knurled cottonwoods.

It’s early spring and the Holsclaws and the Bergers are busy helping their Herefords and Angus cows give birth. The weather alternates between the most beautiful on earth to wind and temperatures that can kill. The buffalo will not begin to have their calves for another month; they are smarter than cattle and humans. They know this land and are patient. They will wait for the grass to green and the storms of spring to pass. They are teaching me to do the same. I seldom pace the kitchen floor in the predawn light worrying about what will come. The pulse of the Broken Heart Ranch is strong. The parts fit better than ever before.

But that is not to say that there is no worry. I worry about the rest of the northern Great Plains. I worry about whether or not the Wild Idea Buffalo Company can be the life-giving link between the prairie’s health and the greater society. Adam Smith was not wholly right: What is economically good for the individual is not always good for that society. I live in a land suspended between the laws of nature and the laws of economics. The North American grasslands are too fragile to be treated like a factory. Their degradation has harmed the public welfare in ways we have not yet imagined. Their restoration is vital. So, while I could make more money by rejoining the cattle/grain/meat-packer cycle, I choose to do what seems clearly right. I raise and process buffalo with honor and respect for the animals and the land. As a result, this ranch produces the condensed essence of the northern Great Plains in the form of pure buffalo meat, and I take pride in that.

Unfortunately, I am the world’s worst businessman and find it nearly impossible to play the role of salesman. But I am passionate about the restoration of these Great Plains and I am heartened to find that I am not alone in my passion. People all over this country have bought Wild Idea buffalo meat. Our customers include city dwellers, country people, environmentalists, industrialists, health fanatics, fine restaurants, and heart patients who thought they could never enjoy red meat again. We have even sold our buffalo meat to vegetarians who see it as a meat that passes their test for purity and morality. Most rewarding are the families that have converted completely to Wild Idea meat, who will eat no other meat. They tell us that it tastes real, untainted by the trappings of the industrial complex that threatens our connection to nature. They tell us that such meat promotes health in humans, the grasslands, and even the national psyche. As one customer put it, “Eating this meat is helping to restore the grasslands one bite at a time.” It all takes a lot of time. But though I feel this entrepreneurial venture tugging me away from the land, I know it is absolutely necessary to somehow integrate what I love with the realities of the marketplace.

Sam Hurst and I dove into the Wild Idea Buffalo Company with a mantra of “quit talking and do something!” People have been discussing the role of native plants and animals in the restoration of the Great Plains for decades. But, as in everything, when all is said and done, there’s a lot more said than done. Sam and I have read John Wesley Powell, Linda Hasselstrom, Richard Manning, Wes Jackson, and Frank and Deborah Poppers. We know the theories of how these plains can best be used. But it took that scary edge of economic desperation to launch us into the Wild Idea Buffalo Company.

We started off slowly, wading through the intricacies of government meat inspection, corporate strategies, tax laws, shipping, marketing, and the Internet. As an afterthought, just as this book was first going to press, I included our brand-new website address in the author biography. It was that nearly inadvertent act that has led to my best glimpse at the impact of this book.

I’ve received perhaps a thousand e-mails from readers, all of them supportive, all of them voicing solidarity for our efforts to restore the Great Plains. From all fifty states and places as far away as New Delhi, I have received messages from people who feel a kinship with the Great Plains and with the buffalo. There is something universal in the human response to the plight of this place and its signature species. I am left wondering if this response is not a combination of longing for the freedom of movement that the Great Plains represents and a sort of collective guilt for our grave misunderstanding of its natural dynamics.

With buffalo again on this land, the early spring is a laid-back time. Winter is over and the promise of summer is everywhere. A few days ago I decided to go out to look at the buffalo, and since there are a few dozen old bales of hay around the buildings—security for the weeks of impenetrable snowdrifts that, this year, never came—I decided to take a bale along with me. The bale weighed a thousand pounds and was all our little Rhino tractor could carry. I scooped the bale up in the loader’s jaws and idled out to the herd, dropping the bale twenty yards from the group of bulls who naturally segregate themselves from the females at this time of year.

My plan was to get behind the bale and roll the hay out in a line a couple hundred feet long. But as I jockeyed the Rhino around to begin pushing, the bulls loped slowly toward me. They were feeling frisky from the hint of spring in the air and didn’t give me a chance to begin unrolling. One of the bulls hit the bale with a lowered head and sent it somersaulting. It was Curly Bill: indistinguishable in size from the biggest bulls now and full of piss and vinegar. I watched him play with the hay bale and marveled at his strength and sense of joy. He actually hooked the half-ton bale with his horns and tossed it repeatedly into the air like a trained seal playing with a ball. Curly was one happy buffalo but underlying the playfulness were the ripple of iron rump muscles and the flex of a neck ready for the combat of the coming breeding season. Curly was ready for the next round of survival and I guess that could be said of me, too.

Though the Broken Heart Ranch is still mired in sucking debt and the Wild Idea Buffalo Company is staggering under start-up costs, I am still basically an idealistic cowboy—a euphemism for a soft-headed dreamer. So when Sam came to me six months ago with a proposal to buy another ranch to perpetuate the ideals of the Broken Heart and Wild Idea, I thought about it for about a day before going to the banker and putting everything on the line. This new ranch is much bigger and much wilder than the Broken Heart: 25,000 acres of roadless pastures with long views of badlands and riparian river bottoms that take your breath away.

Standing at the ranch’s modest headquarters, you can see the bare walls of Badlands National Park ten miles distant. Those rock walls make up the new ranch’s eastern boundary and form a barrier that even buffalo cannot cross. The scope of this new ranch is nearly beyond my ability to imagine, but still tiny when viewed in the context of the northern Great Plains. I’ll be making the payments and paying the taxes but I will never own this new ranch for two reasons. First, I will be dead and gone to dust long before it is paid for. I’m okay with that. In fact, there is something about that that makes me smile. The second reason I will never own this new ranch is that most of it belongs to you.

The ranch is on the Cheyenne River ninety miles from the Broken Heart and includes a large lease on the Buffalo Gap National Grassland—one of twenty national grasslands totaling nearly four million acres. These are lands that were either never attractive enough to be homesteaded or homesteads that failed and were turned back to the federal government to become public lands. They are your national grasslands. It is land whose status is somewhere between that of a national park and the free range of days past. Sam and I hope eventually to run buffalo on our little section of the Buffalo Gap National Grassland instead of the cows that have summered there since the wild buffalo were expatriated a hundred and fifty years ago. Though I intend to remain living here on the Broken Heart, I will be spending a lot of time commuting between the two ranches, a lot of time to think about what these plains were like before we tried and failed to tame them. I’ll be thinking a lot about the fact that this land was once as wild and exotic as Africa’s Serengeti, with huge herds moving constantly in all directions. I’ll be thinking about our opportunity to restore biological diversity by converting the United States of America’s national grasslands back to buffalo. I look forward to the driving.

Sam and I have an image in our minds that includes private and government land managers joining together to restore vast portions of the Great Plains by using buffalo to massage the land back to health. This Cheyenne River Ranch is strategically located in the center of the historic northern buffalo range. It encompasses thirty square miles of national grasslands, and is bordered by a national park, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and land owned by several private ranchers who are interested in the economic advantage of returning buffalo to their land. We dream that our new risky venture can be the centrifuge from which the idea of a huge herd of harvestable, wild buffalo could be spun out across the plains to finally include significant portions of the buffalo’s original range.

Though small in context of this dream, buying the ranch was a very big deal for us. It has been a long and frightening process, a journey into the unfamiliar territory of seven-figure financing and twenty-page contracts. The amount of work ahead and the debt are numbing, and from time to time during the purchase process I have had my doubts. After one particularly long, incomprehensible meeting with an attorney, Sam and I stood on the sidewalk outside the office and shook our heads. “Are we slipping toward the dark side?” I asked.

Sam took his time in answering and at first I didn’t understand what he was saying. “It’s a question of scale,” he said. “It takes a big gun to shoot an elephant.” There was that allusion to the plains of Africa again. But this time the metaphor was tempered by pragmatism. The elephant, of course, is the problem of respectful coexistence with the harsh climate and environment of the northern Great Plains. The big gun is the power of capitalism and the tools of commerce.

And Jill has caught the spirit, too. She has been out of the restaurant business for over a year but has just entered into a new venture—the Sweetgrass Buffalo Grill. It will open in Rapid City next month and feature the finest in pure, healthy food from our region. I have signed on to do the carpentry work at no pay.

So as this new ranch has become a reality and my new life moves on, I wonder if I’ve taken on more than I should have. I’m trying to write another novel but find that I have to write in the mornings before seven o’clock. After that, it’s outside work at one of the ranches, painting the Sweetgrass Grill in the evenings, picking up jobs here and there to make ends meet. I have a cell phone and a damned day planner in which I write things like “take an hour to smell the roses, walk the dogs, take a nap.”

“I never thought I’d find myself in this position,” I told Erney the other day. “I’m too old for this. I should be thinking of retirement, sitting beside a fire reading novels.”

We were loading a fencing wagon into the back of the pickup. It was the same wagon we’d used to carry wire and posts when we converted this place from cattle to buffalo. Its work was done here and it was heading for the Cheyenne River Ranch. The Rhino was dieseling beside the wagon and from its loader bucket, a heavy log chain dangled down to the wagon’s axle. “You like being busy,” Erney said as he caught the swinging chain with one hand.

“Yeah, but this could kill me. If this wagon doesn’t fall on me the bank is going to come and repossess it.”

“Well, hell,” he said. “You want to live forever?”

“No, but I don’t want to starve to death either.”

“Hell,” Erney said, “you got to die of something.” Then he looked out at the pasture east of the house. “Besides, we got enough food to last thirty years.” He waved his hand toward the distant brown splotches on the horizon and went to wrapping the chain around the wagon axle.

He laughed at his own joke and I looked out to the herd casting long, morning shadows over the grama grass. A red-tailed hawk, freshly returned from its wintering grounds, soared high above the buffalo, and the wind came warm from the south. I heard Erney mounting the tractor, the diesel rapping up, and then the sound of the chain going tight as the loader rose to the ready position. A couple buffalo chased one another down the hillside, then back up again. It was hard to pull my eyes away, but when I did I found Erney smiling from the tractor seat. I smiled back and when I gave him the thumbs-up sign the fencing wagon rose from the ground and moved to dangle above the pickup box. It would not touch the earth again until we unloaded it at the Cheyenne River. Then, like the rest of us, it would go back to work.