CHAPTER 2

For the past fifteen years I have had assistance on the ranch in the form of a friend named Erney Hersman. He’s been a great help to me in everything. He’s honest, trustworthy, good with the animals, and sober. He is cut from different stuff than most of us. He does not long for a better house, a new car, or a ranch of his own. If he has a fault, it is that he has never had much ambition. Almost sixty years old now, Erney is slowing down with aches and pains. But he was never too fast. In fact, as he says himself, he has spent his whole life trying to figure out how to get out of work. He shakes his head if he sees me jogging, walking, or lifting weights. “Why would anyone exercise when they have a perfectly good easy chair and a television set?”

In fact, I don’t have a television. But Erney does, and since he had a satellite dish put up, he has become a junkie. Our different views on television are just one of the ways our personalities are antithetical. I always take too much onto my plate and Erney keeps his as metaphorically clean as possible. (His actual plates go weeks without washing.) He never does more than is necessary and, as a result, has become renowned as a world-class jury-rigger. He lives in a twelve-by-sixteen-foot cabin just east of the ranch house. We built it ten years ago to his specifications: two rooms, with an elevated bunk bed, shower, and toilet in one room, television and wood stove in the other. I tried to convince him that it should be bigger but Erney, whose policy in all things is “That should hold till we get a rope,” insisted that just such a little cabin was what he wanted.

Once a year or so he will pick up the newspapers and banana peels from the floor, but to my knowledge Erney has never actually cleaned house. He is a hoarder of odd objects and a tier of fishing flies. Over the winter, he fills orders for hundreds of dozens of flies to be delivered to a local shop in the spring. Squirreled away in his cabin on rickety shelves, in cigar boxes and Tupperware containers, are thousands of dollars’ worth of bird skins and tufts of animal hair, bought from fishing catalogs or salvaged from roadkills. Probably 80 percent of Erney’s net worth is represented by feathers that he ties and clips and wraps and glues and marries into gorgeous flies. From standard-issue Royal Coachmen to elegant, specially commissioned Atlantic salmon flies, Erney ties them all. The residue from the production of these thousands of flies builds up in windrows on the floor under his workbench. In the other corner, under the falcon perch where Erney keeps the falcons we hunt with, is a crust of whitewash representing a decade of falcon excrement, like the strata of ancient ocean beds.

We have three bird dogs that find the game birds for the falcons in the autumn. Chip is an English setter, the son of Spud, who died after twelve years of service to this ranch. Spot is a delicate black-and-white setter puppy with no sense but great potential. The setters are happiest in the kennel at night but Moose-Ann, the tiny springer spaniel, has the run of the place. All the dogs love Erney’s cabin and pile into a wad on the dirty coveralls below his bed. They scratch and pull burrs and indulge their flatulence to their hearts’ content. With Erney tying flies, the dogs sprawled in varying angles of repose, The People’s Court blaring on the television, and the fire cranked up on a cold February day, it is a lair only the brave dare enter.

Erney works a couple hours a day in exchange for a place to live and a pickup to drive. He joined me when his previous employer went bankrupt. He showed up from a job gone terribly bad with thirty-seven dollars, a beat up Luv truck, two cardboard boxes of stuff, and the defeatist philosophy that nothing was worth taking pride in. Because I was working jobs around the West to make the land payments, I needed him as a sort of caretaker. He lived in the house at first, but I was on him about everything—the dirty dishes, the piles of junk mail, the Pepsi bottles filled with cigarette butts and apple cores. It became quickly obvious that Erney needed his own space.

But before we got Erney’s cabin built we were visited by a friend of mine named Mary from New York City. Mary’s a novelist and a city girl all the way. It was the spring of the year, May, and a busy time to be on a ranch. In those days of serious cattle ranching I thought you had to be overworked, miserable, and financially strapped every spring. Mary and I spent the days feeding cows, checking the last few heifers to calve in case they needed help, ear tagging, branding, vaccinating, dehorning, doing all the things necessary to get the cattle herd ready to go to summer pasture—in the vernacular of the plains, to put them out on grass.

A few days after she arrived we moved the cows and their calves out of the calving pasture, where we’d been feeding hay and grain, and into the summer pasture. We used horses more then and Mary got a big kick out of driving the little herd the mile and a quarter to their summer quarters. It was the middle of a wet May and the bromegrass was already eight inches high. The hills to the south were as green as Ireland and the cattle looked sleek and happy as they filed through the gate and onto the new grass.

I was off my horse and closing the gate behind the last bucking calf and Mary was looking out at the herd scattering into the fivehundred-acre pasture complex. “And you leave them out here all summer?” she asked.

“Depending on the summer,” I said. “Probably until September.”

She had a puzzled look on her face. “What do they drink?”

I could tell what she was thinking because since she had gotten to the ranch we had been filling a water tank in the corral twice a day so the herd could drink. “There are stock dams in each pasture.” I pointed to a hill. “Over there.” That seemed to satisfy her for an instant, but the puzzled look again came to her face.

I could see the question forming up in her mind before she found the words. “Well,” she said, “what will they eat between now and September?”

I leaned over, pulled a handful of the lush bromegrass, and held it out to her horse. “Grass,” I said. The horse chomped the grass with delight.

“Just grass?”

“Just grass.”

I’ll bet my New York friend is not the only one to be amazed that cattle can survive the summer nicely on nothing but water and grass. A generation ago you would have been hard-pressed to find someone who didn’t understand that simple fact. But now, even people who should know are amazingly ignorant of how their steaks and burgers get to their tables. I was once flying over South Dakota with a former senator of our state and talked idly about how the federal program to build stock dams expanded grazing to areas where cattle could not live before because of lack of water. We were looking down on the western part of the state and there were hundreds of stock dams within our sight. The senator showed the same puzzled look that my novelist friend had had. When he finally spoke, it was low enough that no one else in the airplane could hear. “You mean all those little lakes are man-made?”

Yes, they are all man-made. Before the government programs that followed in the wake of the Dust Bowl disaster, cattle could not graze great portions of the Great Plains because they could not find water. They were restricted to a half day’s walk from permanent water sources, of which there are few on the Great Plains. One of the results of the expansion of grazing by creating additional water sources is that even more wildlife habitat has been ruined by overgrazing.

In the American imagination, the northern Great Plains have always been cattle country. But like the American imagination itself, that notion is a product of popular culture, mythology, and Madison Avenue. The fact is that cattle are very new to the northern plains. There were no herds of cattle in my country until after the Sioux were defeated in the late 1870s. Before that time, of course, the large-herbivore niche was taken up by the buffalo. Its real name is bison, but the first Europeans to see them confused the bison with the Old World buffalo, and the name stuck. But by whatever they called them, Europeans, with their new technology and overwhelming numbers, couldn’t resist exploiting the vast herds. In short order most of the buffalo in the world were killed off for their tongues and hides. Then herds of Texas longhorns and cattle from the Northwest streamed into the northern plains to insure that the grass would not be “wasted.” Buffalo can survive on much less water from more obscure sources than cattle. They will eat snow, search out tiny springs, even paw the earth for water, and this allows them to roam many miles from major sources of water. That difference between cattle and buffalo is obvious enough for anyone to see. More subtle is the observation that buffalo evolved on the northern plains at the same time that the plant species they depended upon evolved. Their existence is mutually beneficial. Whatever pressure buffalo put on the native plant species, those species have had eons to evolve strategies to survive and flourish. The introduction of alien species, such as cattle, confounds these natural relationships and pushes the ecosystem toward entropy. A million years of coevolution produces communities of species whose relationship is symbiotic, and that concept extends to man’s relationship to buffalo as a food source.

On my little ranch the buffalo were exterminated just as the land was opened for homesteading. Malgrazing (a combination of overgrazing and grazing in a way the environment has not evolved to sustain) began immediately. Almost all the land flat enough to plow was turned under by 1920. By the 1930s the precious topsoil exposed by plowing and malgrazing began to blow away. The devastation continued unabated for another forty years. Only in the 1970s was any kind of science and reasonable land ethic applied to the management of the northern Great Plains. And even then its application was very limited.

In the face of the world’s exploding human population and the apparent victory of materialism over all other worldviews, restoring the strength of the prairie ecosystem seems futile. But there are a few ranches that are trying. One of the best examples in my area is the Triple Seven Ranch. The name derives from the ranch’s brand—777—a venerable old brand from the original open-range days, when the ranch comprised hundreds of thousands of acres. That was in the 1880s, when the habitat was still intact.

But even today’s biggest ranches no longer have the benefit of truly open range, and the 777 is no exception. Now the 777 is 90 percent deeded land and 10 percent ground leased from government agencies like the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management. The 777 now consists of over twenty thousand acres, but they own no cattle. They currently run nothing but buffalo.

It was on the extreme eastern edge of the 777, near the Badlands National Monument, that, years before, I’d encountered the buffalo bull that had so ignited my imagination. Looking back it seems logical that that old bull had escaped the 777 to rendezvous with me on the dusty back road. Had he smashed through the fence, or did he possess enough magic to pass through the barbed wire as effortlessly as a prairie breeze?