CHAPTER 3

The 777 is owned by the Hillenbrand family, who came to western South Dakota thirty-five years ago and bought the ranch because they loved the land. They ran it, through a foreman, as a traditional cattle ranch for a dozen years, then began a conversion to buffalo. Now they run fifteen hundred mother buffalo cows and several hundred bulls.

The 777 is well known in the country south of Rapid City for its stark beauty. The land runs from the eastern foothills of the Black Hills to the western edge of the Badlands National Monument and includes wooded draws, western wheatgrass and buffalo grass on the flats, bluestem and grama on the slopes, most of the major ecotypes of the mixed-grass prairie. It even has some creeks that flow in all but the driest years. I’ve known Duane Lammers, the manager of the 777, for over twenty years. I remember when he was just a cowboy with a good head and an excess of energy. Since he took over running the 777, fifteen years ago, I hadn’t seen much of him, though when our paths did cross, he never failed to invite me down for a buffalo roundup.

But it took a crisis in my life to actually get me down to the 777. In the winter of 1997–98 I was damaged goods. I had done ignoble things I had not thought myself capable of doing. I was suffering through the failure of my marriage and had been hiding out at my ranch. I’d become a bit of a hermit and recognized that I had to do something to stop myself from circling the drain. Two more friends, Sam Hurst and Mimi Hillenbrand, prodded me to get off my ass and out of the house. Sam had given up a fast life as an NBC News producer for a small buffalo ranch not far from the 777, and Mimi is the Hillenbrand family member who sees after the big ranch. They had been heading up a conspiracy for a couple years to get me interested in buffalo. They argued that because of my love of wildness, my interest in rangeland, and my passion for restoring the northern plains to health, that buffalo and I were a natural fit. Though they were clearly right, I was spooked by the immense investment of money and work that would be required to convert my little ranch from cattle to buffalo. Plus, I just didn’t have much energy. What I really wanted to do was to sit in the rickety ranch house where I had been exiled and feel sorry for myself. But Duane, Mimi, and Sam kept on me, so that in the beginning of January of 1998 I ventured out of the house for the short fifty-mile trip to the 777 ranch’s annual buffalo roundup.

It was subzero and blustery in the predawn of that morning, and my energy and resolve nearly failed me as I scraped at the frost on the windshield of my pickup. I looked up at the chimney pipe on the house and watched the smoke trail away in the wind. I dreaded the thought of talking to people, hated the idea of standing in a windy corral all day. But I dreaded even more the thought of another day sitting in front of the stove alone. I had just finished a particularly good book, Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, and in addition to other depressions was suffering from literary postpartum and troubled by the daunting task of finding a book as good as the last one. I continued to scrape at the windshield till finally the defroster began making a dent in the winter that had accumulated on the glass. The sun had not yet begun to lighten the starless January sky.

My place is tucked in against the northern foothills of the Black Hills, on a prairie filled with shale ridges and wooded draws. Erney and I have a not-too-distant view of the Hills and of Bear Butte, the birthplace of Crazy Horse. In my pickup I followed the arch of the Black Hills to the southeast and skirted the traffic of Rapid City, the only real town for hundreds of miles. I kept the Black Hills to my right until a small, simple sign announced that the 777 headquarters was six miles east on a private gravel road. As I’d never been to the headquarters before, I was astounded at the size of the corrals. In the morning light the great pressure-treated posts and highway guardrail loomed up out of the frosty ground as seemingly incongruous as a sculpture by Cristo. A dozen pickup trucks were parked by a metal shed, and men in insulated coveralls scurried here and there, readying horses and equipment for the first hard day’s work of what would be a week of processing buffalo.

The main job was to separate the calves from the herd and vaccinate them, but as long as the buffalo were going through the chute the bulls would be counted, the calves and cows inoculated for internal parasites, and a few cases of pinkeye treated. In all, there were over two thousand animals to be worked. The crew was made up of the boss, Duane Lammers, the main hired man (and Duane’s cousin), Scott Lammers, Mimi, Sam, eight young men from the local college rodeo team, and a few old farts like myself who were used to cattle and, though intrigued, were skeptical of buffalo as a cash crop.

Duane came out of the shed with his perpetual cup of coffee steaming in his gloved hand. Space heaters roared behind him, coaxing icy engines to life. It was still below zero, and Duane, who is usually quick with a joke, showed the stress of the coming week on his face. “You want to ride a horse or an ATV?”

I shrugged. “What are we doing?”

“We got to go out and get ’em.”

“Where are they?”

“We’ll show you. Take that horse, Buster. He’s not too scared of ’em.” He pointed to a long-legged sorrel gelding with a bald face and socks. The horse was tied to an eight-foot-high guardrail and wire corral fence and stood hip-shot, looking at me over his big, quarter-horse rump. When I turned back to Duane he was gone, answering questions from two rodeo-team guys while he dialed someone on his cell phone. Mimi came up from behind and elbowed me in the ribs.

“Glad you finally made it down here. You ready for this?”

“I don’t know.” I’d been close to only that one buffalo. “Should I be scared?”

“No, you’re going to love these critters. Just follow along and try not to get in the way.”

“Maybe I should stay here and make sure no one steals the coffee.”

“No way. Go get your overalls on or you’ll freeze your tush.”

Ten minutes later, six all-terrain vehicles and four horses were lined up like the dingbat company of Rommel’s army. Duane and Scott stood beside Duane’s big, white, extended-cab, dual-tired Dodge diesel pickup. Everyone leaned toward their conversation to get instructions. But Scott and Duane are understated westerners and have worked together for so long that they seem, like some old couples, to communicate in a private language. Leaning from my horse, hoping for an explanation of what was expected from me, this is what I heard: “Probably out by the big prairie-dog town.”

“Most.”

“Take ’em through the east gate?”

“If they’ll go.”

“Maybe the gate by the three green fence posts.”

“Or by the spring.”

“Yeah.” Then a pause for a sip of coffee. “Got your radio? Yeah, then right along the fence to the dogleg.”

“Tha’d work.”

“Keep the horses against the east side. Push ’em right on in.”

“Then we can pick up the rest if the wind changes.”

“Yeah, either that or tomorrow.”

“Sounds good. Let’s go.”

Scott jumped on his ATV, revved it up, and tore off like he was upset. But he waved for us all to follow. Before I knew it, I was loping along beside Mimi with the ATVs screaming far ahead. “What the hell are we doing?” I said.

“Are you going to start whining already?”

“Mimi,” I said, “I don’t want to get gored.”

“Oh, whaa whaa whaa. We’re still four miles from the nearest buffalo.” She waved a dismissive hand at me and kicked her horse up a notch. I would have let her go but my toes were already frozen and I didn’t want to get lost.

We caught up to the ATVs just as they funneled through a gate being held open by Duane’s wife, Rose. She had driven a pickup out to open gates and, via the two-way radios and some help from a sort of ranch telepathy, had found the right gate from literally hundreds to choose from. Duane’s big Dodge was right in front of Mimi, and as he went through the gate, Rose handed off another thermos of coffee. As we rode the horses through, Rose smiled up at me. “Good luck,” she said.

“Rose,” I said, “can you tell me what the hell we’re doing?”

She smiled and shrugged. “Oh, come on,” Mimi said, and slapped my horse on the rump with her reins.

I had on all the clothes I owned. In addition to long underwear, jeans, and a wool shirt, I wore insulated coveralls—a cross between blue jeans and a kid’s snowsuit, full length, lined, zippers all over the place, and cow-shit-resistant in the bargain. They’re good equipment and you can actually ride a horse while wearing them. Snowmobile gloves and stocking caps are good gear, too. When I had a full head of hair I could do without the cap, but now it was essential. I also wore cowboy boots, a habit that is hard to forsake, though even with overshoes, they’re not worth the powder to blow them to hell when it comes to cold. In winter there is something about dangling cowboy-booted feet over the sides of a horse and the way you put pressure on the stirrups that reminds you of dropping a propane tank on your toe. Another mile into the wind and I was complaining like a tomcat on a roller coaster.

But there was no one to listen or give a damn, just miles of rangeland, a few forsaken prairie-dog holes, and Mimi. The ATVs, Duane, and the other horses had disappeared, and I would have thought we were lost except that this was Mimi’s ranch and she seemed to know where we were. We’d slowed to a walk and cut through a gate that the others hadn’t taken. Mimi and I share an interest in grass and grassland ecology, and though it was winter she pointed out plants and prattled about grazing rotation systems and the vegetation inventory she had been doing for years.

Her interest in this forgotten ecosystem heartened me, and if I weren’t so cold and lost it would have been pure joy. As it was, I became engrossed in her description of a paper she was presenting for some range conservation group and so I wasn’t paying close enough attention to my surroundings. But when we came up over the top of a large, flat, grassy hill, my breath actually caught in my throat. I forgot about the frozen feet and only grunted and shook my head. In front of us lay an enormous dish of land that stretched for miles under a pale January sky. Sagebrush, yucca, and wispy snowdrifts extending to somewhere just under the morning sun. We could see the Badlands from there, and between us and those distant eroding buttes were a few thousand acres of brown specks and streaks moving like bait fish on an enormous saltwater flat.

It took a moment for the scale to register, but when it did I realized that the brown specks and streaks were buffalo. The buffalo were being pushed from behind by frenetic little red-and-blue gadflies. The ATVs whizzed back and forth, and as we watched, the buffalo grew in size. They seemed to multiply, as if they were coming from Earth herself. Suddenly the first of the herd were close enough that I could see their tongues lolling out the sides of their mouths as they loped in their stiff-legged, otherworldly, but eternal way.

“Come on,” Mimi said. “We’re s’posed to be over there.” She pointed somewhere far ahead of us and we were off, suddenly joined by the other two horsemen. When we reached the distant side of the pasture Mimi waved her arms. “Spread out,” she said. “We have to make them go south.”

The advance guard of the herd, the animals that tend to be the most wild and skittish, were already drawing near. I could see the whites of one old, broken-horned cow’s eyes. “How do we make them go south?”

The horses were fifty yards apart now. “More like dissuade them from going north,” she shouted, and smiled.

The old wild-eyed cow swung to face me. Her woolly bouffant head was enormous and her broken horn was in the shape of a corkscrew. She could smell fear. “Go ahead,” Mimi yelled. “You can start dissuading her.”

The main herd had begun to pass behind the cow—they seemed to be going in the right direction—but the old cow was walking toward me. “Okay, Buster,” I said as I patted the horse’s neck, “we need to turn this old girl around.” I nudged him with my frozen feet and he took a couple tentative steps toward the old cow, who grunted and shook her head. A three-foot-long string of buffalo snot cartwheeled into oblivion and Buster danced, first left, then right. “Go on, old girl,” I said to the cow. “Go with your buddies. Shoo.” She took a couple more steps toward us and I felt Buster moving backward.

I knew it was important that the cow didn’t go north. If the herd saw one going that way, it might follow, and then not only would I be in the middle of a two-thousand-buffalo stampede but Duane would chew my ass. But when I spurred Buster, his backward speed increased. I tried reasoning with them both. “Come on, Buster, we can do this. Shoo, girl, go on.”

It wasn’t working, but just when I thought all was lost Mimi came charging in from the side. She loped toward the cow, waving her arms. “Hyaa, you old son of a bitch. Get moving!”

The old cow spun like a cutting horse and sprinted for the herd that was going where it was supposed to go. Mimi walked her horse up beside me and Buster. “Were you going to let her go north?”

I shook my head. “No, no. We were just practicing our reverse lope.”

She shook her head. “We’re going to try to get a third of these into the corral. Try to keep up.” When she took off, Buster and I were very close behind.

The buffalo herd was strung out for a mile in front of us, a couple thousand animals moving like a carpet of dark, brown, liquid wool, up and down the rolling frozen hills toward the corral that I took on faith was somewhere ahead of us. Now the horses and the ATVs closed ranks behind the herd and the more experienced buffalo-boys and buffalogirls coursed back and forth, reading the minds of sly old rogues contemplating a run for it. Once an old bull spun on an ATV and in an impressive show of acceleration nearly made contact with the fleeing vehicle. Just like in the movies, Duane roared between them with his big white Dodge. Snow and gravel flew, and when the animal stopped to analyze its chances for a dash to the far side of the ranch, Duane stepped out with a Smith & Wesson .357 and faced him down. This buffalo was pissed and made a few stiff-legged hops in Duane’s direction. Its tail was erect, a clear sign that it meant business, but Duane was cool. He held the pistol at his side until he was sure the bull was not going to be bluffed.

I didn’t know the Smith was loaded only with birdshot—a thimbleful of BBs, little more than an irritation for a two-thousand-pound bull buffalo—so when Duane raised the pistol to eye level and fired, I expelled a “Holy shit!” The buffalo snorted and pulled up thirty yards short of Duane. Another round caused him to shake his head as if he had been bee stung. He snorted a couple more times, then turned and ambled back to the herd as if he had just decided that he wanted to go in the same direction as everyone else anyway.

The buffalo passed through a wire gate and into a funnel-shaped pasture of several hundred acres. The gate was shut behind us all, and very slowly the herd was eased toward the corral, where heavy iron gates stood open to let them in. But the lead animals were cautious. They did not want to go any farther and began to mill a hundred yards from the corral. Suddenly and inexplicably, Scott and Duane raced ahead at fifty miles per hour, expertly cutting off six or seven hundred animals from the main herd and pushing them soundlessly, except for the gentle rumble of twenty-five hundred hooves against the prairie floor, into the corral. Scott was off his ATV like a champion calf roper, which he is, and had the heavy gate halfway closed before the buffalo churned around the corral and started back. The gate was neatly shut and chained before they could blast it open.

For this last maneuver, Buster and I stood, wide-eyed and quiet, at the side of the action. As soon as the first group of buffalo were secure behind the gate, vehicles and horses accelerated for the corral, with people opening gates, shutting down machines, unzipping coveralls, and proceeding to their workstations as if this were a military exercise.

By the time I got Buster tied to a hitching rail and his girth loosened, men and women were at their stations, testing the hydraulic gates of the chute, preparing syringes, chipping at the ice that had built up in the alleyway. Most of the rodeo team chugged Mountain Dew and, while carefully preparing their equipment, roughhoused and joked with one another without pause.

The 777’s corrals are basically a series of stout pens of decreasing size leading to a welded-pipe alleyway with five sliding steel doors that partition off buffalo-sized cubicles. These cubicles can be opened into one of several different pens: by manipulating the doors, the heifer calves can be “cut” into one pen, the bull calves into another, the adult bulls into a third, and the cows pushed on down the alleyway to the squeeze chute, where they can be “worked.” After the cows have been worked, the other classes of animals can be funneled around and down the alleyway to receive the particular treatment they require.

“Worked” can mean one or more of many operations, from vaccination to pregnancy testing. The theory behind the 777’s buffalo management is: do as little as possible to the animals. It is the high expense-to-income ratio that has forever made the cattle industry tenuous. The idea is to let the buffalo live as close to a wild condition as possible. But that year Duane had contracted to sell fifty head of buffalo cows to ranchers in Canada, where their enlightened federal government is guaranteeing loans for ranchers willing to convert from cattle. The animals heading for Canada not only needed to be pregnancy tested but also needed to satisfy international law that they were free of diseases such as brucellosis and tuberculosis.

The day was already warming, and as I peeled off my first layer of clothes and watched other men and women preparing for a week of hard outdoor work, I noticed that they were happy despite the severe conditions. We reveled in the pure air, hard work, and sense of purpose. It was the sort of joy that had been missing from the cattle business for decades, and from my life for at least a year.

Over the roundup week I tried to do a little of everything, from cutting small groups of animals off to helping the vet with the vaccinations. I marveled at the speed and strength of the buffalo, the way they could accelerate to their top speed of probably thirty miles per hour in just a few feet, the way they could turn without losing any of that speed. I laid my hand against their rumps as I inoculated them. I let my fingers linger in dense, curly hair and dared to touch the black shiny horns when they were restrained in the chute. I saw it all and with every day became more and more fascinated with the idea of buffalo and their place on the northern plains. They watched me as I studied them. Like strangers meeting in a wilderness meadow we appraised each other with wary curiosity, and I could see that no two were alike. Their body shapes varied from muscular and sleek to frumpy and disheveled. Some were nearly black and some were a sun-bleached blond. A few were aggressive, though most were just aloof. But all possessed a dignified wildness that penetrated me with every haughty glance.

I was exhausted at the end of each day but awoke with an energy that I thought I’d lost for good. All that week I found myself watching them, the huge woolly heads, the strong shoulders, the small eyes, and the stout black horns. Unlike the cattle I had run on my ranch for twenty years, these animals had been engineered by natural selection to live where I lived. That shared landscape established a kinship, but, dispite the kinship, I couldn’t help salivating when a nice two-year-old came through the chute. I’d eaten a few buffalo steaks and they were wonderful. Raised properly and prepared right, it has no rival. It is not some artificially grown red meat. It was the food of Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Red Cloud. Standing in the cold prairie air made it easier to feel who I really was. Being that close to so much fine food made me hungry.

Periodically throughout that week we collected a few very small calves and shuttled them off to a special pen with a little hay and a watering tank. All very young buffalo calves were called “red” calves. They are actually more golden than red, a color that Sam Hurst theorizes evolved as a protective camouflage, to mimic the signature clumps of bluestem that sprinkle vast sections of the Great Plains. For some reason these calves were born very late, months after the bulk of the calves who were now five hundred pounds and eating grass on their own. Some of these red calves were little more than a week old, less than fifty pounds, and still depending on mother’s milk. But most had become separated from their mothers and were milk starved. There was no doubt that these calves, in another time, would have been culled out of the herd by winter or wolves. Even now, with a herd the size of the 777’s, their prospects were not good. They would require more care than a big ranch is set up to deliver. The calves were a problem, both practically and philosophically, and I overheard Scott and Duane talking over their fate. These men had much more important responsibilities than the care of a dozen runts that in any case might not be worth the effort.

On the last day of the roundup the two men were standing behind the chute, talking in hushed tones as the last few cows were processed, and I leaned to hear what they were saying. Duane was trying to figure out someplace to put the red calves, and Scott, thinking of the size of the 777 operation and the potential for the calves getting lost in the day-to-day chores of the ranch, seemed depressed about their chances for survival. From where I stood I could see the group of little, short-necked, golden balls of wool. Of these thirteen, not one weighed more than a medium-sized English setter. I still had my gloves on and for some reason felt that I should take them off. I shoved them into the pockets of my coveralls and stepped up to Scott and Duane with my arms folded across my chest. They stopped talking and looked at me as if to say, “May we help you?”

“I’ll take ’em,” I said.

I don’t know why I said it, but as soon as it was out I knew that this was the right thing to do. I was desperate to rediscover purpose in my life, and on that cold South Dakota day, those thirteen imperiled packages of fur and sinew seemed kindred souls. I wanted us all to move on to a better life, I wanted my ranch to be as balanced and healthy as it could be. “I’d like to try ’em,” I said. “I think Erney and I can take care of them until spring. Then you can help us sell them as yearlings.”

Duane doesn’t joke about money. “Well, we can’t just give them to you.”

We both knew normal heifer calves were worth two thousand dollars and the bulls were worth seven hundred. “I’ll pay,” I said. “Half price for the ones that live.”

Duane and Scott glanced at each other. Scott looked a little relieved and nodded his head ever so slightly. The nodding seemed to set Duane’s head to nodding, too. “You got yourself a deal,” Duane said. “Borrow one of our trailers. Take ’em home with you tonight.” He slapped me on the shoulder as he passed, moving on to close down the roundup for the year, on to shipping buffalo to Canada, six-figure deals by the score. And I was left staring at those thirteen little buffalo calves, wondering what I had done.