CHAPTER 17

After we turned the last of the buffalo out, it snowed all night. It didn’t get extremely cold but there was a north wind that, in the wake of a beautiful fall, took your breath away. Erney and I waited until nine o’clock the next morning to see if the snow might break, then finally ventured out to be sure the buffalo were all right. There wouldn’t have been much we could have done if there was a problem, but we couldn’t stand to sit at the kitchen table, watching out the window and wondering what was going on in the back pasture.

Only a few inches of snow had accumulated and we were able to call the whole herd to us for range cake, a livestock feed made of alfalfa and a little grain. Range cake resembles giant dog food kibbles and you buy it by the ton. I’d bought a few tons on Duane’s recommendation and we’d fed some to our buffalo right along to keep them friendly. The 777 animals, who had assumed leadership of the herd, loved it. Erney sat on the tailgate and shook a hundred pounds of cake out onto the ground as I drove slowly in a circle, and when the old cows heard the cake rattling out of the buckets, they came running. There was already enough snow that the pickup tracks held the cake like miniature troughs and by the time we’d made a circle of cake fifty yards across, the entire herd was strung out, nosing in the snow for a treat. But they did not eat the way cattle eat, with their heads down gobbling for life. The herd of buffalo seemed as intent on chasing one another, frolicking in the new snow, and innocently testing the herd pecking order as they did on eating.

Erney and I moved the truck off fifty yards and watched the buffalo at play like two men enchanted. A hint of vertigo seeped into the pickup cab as we stared out at the new, yet familiar landscape. No seam divided the pale sky and the snowy earth, and the buttes and ridge tops were gone in the lowering clouds. The wind had come up, and falling snow slanted across the woolly brown shapes of buffalo standing against the pure white background. Had a painter rendered such a scene I would have described it as romantically corny. But for us this first snap of winter, with buffalo grazing as if they were part of a movie flashback, was as real as it gets. We heard the wind whine at pickup doors that don’t seal properly; we knew what an early snow like this could mean, and we knew that we were powerless to change what might happen in the next four months.

There is a story told by some of the Lakota people who live on the Missouri River reservations that speaks of humanity’s lack of power in the face of the forces of nature. Like lots of Lakota stories, this one is understated, a lesson of coping, indeed prospering, through acceptance. Stan Holsclaw might have first told me this story; it is the kind of tale that Stan would easily appreciate. It is fitting that the story takes place on the Missouri River, as that river is the carotid artery of the entire northern plains, one of the great metaphors for the power of nature.

There was a young civil engineer who wanted desperately to catch one of the Missouri’s huge catfish. He came to South Dakota to help build the series of mammoth dams that now impound the Missouri and fell in love with the idea of catching a hundred-pound cat. The time was the 1950s, and in those days it was standard procedure to catch catfish by putting lines out into the river and leaving them all night. The dams that the engineer had helped to build were pretty much completed by then. In the name of electric power, navigation, and flood control, the river was harnessed, though some say only temporarily.

The young engineer picked the brains of the Lakota boys he saw catching big fish and they told him that it was easy, as long as the fish was allowed to catch himself. Really big catfish were too strong to fight. With the power of the river helping them, nothing could hold them tight.

After hearing that, the young engineer could be found most evenings prowling the riverbanks with his set line equipment. He baited his hooks with the strong-smelling cheese that the boys told him worked best. But when it came to building the set lines he would not listen. Instead of tying his lines to the willows of the riverbank he drove specially forged steel stakes into the ground and attached high-test braided nylon line to the built-in metal loops. He caught plenty of fish, but he didn’t catch a big one.

Each morning, with fair regularity, a line or two would be gone, torn away, snapped off, lost to the river. The engineer correctly assumed that when a line was gone it meant he had hooked a big fish but his equipment had failed. He sent away for stronger line but the first night he used it the steel stake was pulled out and he lost everything. And all the time he was forced to walk back to town alongside young Lakota boys dragging fish as large as they were.

One day he followed one of the young Lakota boys to see how the boy was catching big fish. The boy did exactly what they had told him to do. The boy tied cotton string to the willow saplings along the bank. The engineer shook his head with contempt. If a line attached to a willow limb ever hooked a fish it would bend and flop like a piece of spaghetti. He resolved to improve his steel stake design by fashioning an anchor that would dig into the bank if he hooked a really large fish. He never understood that it was the suppleness of the willow, the give and take of it, that made the set line work. He was never able to admit that nothing he could build could match the power of the river.

The story of that young engineer comes to mind every time we have a drought or a particularly destructive winter. I watch the neighbors’ wheat and alfalfa dry to dust in July, the price of winter cattle feed soar in December, and I begin to think of the happy lives people try to wring from this land like a hundred-pound catfish.

In tough years I was besieged by calls from friends and family who watched the news on TV and wanted to know if my crops had been ruined or if my cattle were starving. The television view of the northern plains dwells on tragedy and the sensational, yet it is accurate in some ways. While our average high temperatures are similar to many places in the country known for fine weather— forty-five degrees in winter and seventy in summer—the same averages can reflect very different situations. Orange County, California’s, average temperature for July is very much like ours. But that average is derived from fifteen days of seventy-one degrees and fifteen days of sixty-nine degrees. Our seventy-degree average might come from three days of seventy degrees, a week or so of hundred-degree days, and a couple of days that flirt with freezing. What TV accounts of the northern plains leave out is the uncertainty, the unpredictable change of weather that can make things difficult. Spearfish, South Dakota, twenty miles from my ranch, holds the world’s record for temperature change. On that snowy day, January 22, 1943, the temperature stood at four degrees below zero at seven-thirty in the morning. Suddenly a warm Chinook began to blow and at 7:32 A.M. the temperature reached forty-five degrees above zero—a forty-nine degree rise in just two minutes. By 8:45 the temperature was fifty-five degrees above zero and water was running down the streets. But within the hour the temperature had plunged again to zero and the town was covered in a sheet of ice.

This is not a good place to raise plants and animals that have not evolved to handle severe weather changes. It took me fifteen years to realize that the only way to insure that I could tell those concerned friends and family members that my crops were not ruined by drought was to stop growing them. I went back to native grasses as my sole crop. Ten years later, after I’d sat buried helplessly in the house one Christmas while ten cows froze to death in my corrals, I got rid of the cows and went to running just yearlings in the summer.

That first full buffalo winter, Erney and I sat in the pickup and watched the snow gathering on the dark woolly backs for a few more minutes, and again I thought of how powerless we were. I imagined that young engineer, gray-haired and distinguished now, directing the installation of an enormous iron ring in the center of one of the Missouri River’s concrete dams. To the ring he planned to fasten a hundred yards of steel cable as thick as a man’s wrist. The hook would be tiny by comparison and the strong-smelling cheese would be the same but it would take a giant crane to cast the cable into the churning water below the dam.

“We better get the hell out of here,” Erney said.

His voice brought me back to reality. The snow had increased and the buffalo were drifting off. The younger animals seemed to be harassing the older ones by running at them, then veering away when a grumpy old cow would make a short charge in their direction. They were all oblivious to the deteriorating weather, though Erney was not. “We’re going to get our asses stuck out here and have to walk.”

Still infected by the sight of buffalo playing in the snow, I looked at him and smiled. “No foolin’,” he said. I knew he was right but I lingered a few more seconds before popping the pickup into four-wheel -drive and starting back toward the house, where a fire smoldered in the stove.

By the time we got to the corner of the pasture, the gate was hard to see in the blowing snow. When Erney got out to open it the wind stirred up a storm of Styrofoam cups and old hamburger wrappers from the floorboards. Erney and I both slapped at the swirling trash but some must have escaped into the atmosphere and, if it did, it was halfway to Wyoming by the time Erney wrestled the gate open. This was one of those first corners we had set, and as I drove through I noticed that the gatepost had pulled a little farther out of the ground. This gate was made of barbed wire strung between two vertical poles. It was hooked to the gateposts with loops of smooth wire. As the gateposts pulled out, the gate opening became greater and the gate tighter.

I jumped out to help Erney close the gate and was shocked at how cold it had become. The snow was still coming and the wind had increased. Neither of us had dressed for really cold weather; I didn’t even have gloves, so we worked as quickly as we could. The west end of the gate was secure and Erney put his shoulder against the vertical pole on the east. He pushed with all his might and I worked the wire loop over the gatepost. When Erney let up the gate went fiddle-string tight and I made a quick calculation of how many more gates like this we had yet to build—about nine—and a mental note that the posts needed to be anchored to avoid moving.

When we got back to the buildings we plugged in the engine-block heaters on both the pickup and the Rhino tractor. It was noon when I got back into the house but it didn’t seem like noon. Out the kitchen window it looked more like evening due to the reduced visibility. Erney had declared that the storm would not amount to much but had gone on to his cabin to stoke the fire anyway. I was left alone, staring alternately at the thermometer and the nascent blizzard outside the window, and wondering about past inhabitants of this place.

In the pasture a half mile south of the house is a pickup-sized indentation near the top of a gentle hill. No one seems to know who dug the hole but everyone believes it was the site of a homestead, a dugout. When I stand on the edge of the hole, caved in now and grassy clear to the bottom, I have a hard time imagining what it must have been like to live there. Fifty feet from the hole there is a hand-dug well. Rocks and even bricks scattered around suggest that something permanent was envisioned. Perhaps there was a shingled roof over the hole at one time but local legend has it that at least the first winter for these homesteaders was spent with a busted wagon tipped over the hole to keep the winter out. As I sat in the kitchen, with the stove glowing red heat out at me, I wondered not so much how a family could live like that, but why. Had some mistake, some legitimate miscalculation, left them high and dry? Were they so poor that decent housing was out of the question? Did they have no relatives who would take them in? Or were they misfits of some stripe, willing to risk their lives and the lives of their children for some ill-conceived scheme to gain a new chance at life? How could people go into a land like this in winter so poorly prepared?

It was still snowing, so I fed the fire and let my mind wander back another hundred years. Had tepees ever housed families through a winter on this ranch? Large winter camps had used Whitewood Creek, just a few miles north, and I wondered what those camps were like. Were the tepees warm inside? Where did the wood come from to heat them all winter? In the years when snow piled five feet deep between the tents, how was it cleared away with no shovels, no plows? Did life come to a stop until the sun melted enough for humans and horses to move again? If so, life could be stopped for the entire winter. Was there enough to eat when hunting was impossible? What became of the buffalo in truly tough weather? History seldom asks such basic questions, and the answers to my questions cannot be found in textbooks.

The wind was still blowing and icy streaks shot through the yellow beam of the yard light when I fed the dogs. For dinner I cooked up some spaghetti with garlic bread, and later I tried to read. But I was still stuck on the question of what buffalo do during bad winters. There’s a story of an entire herd using a stranded passenger train for shelter. The passengers were terrified that the buffalo would push the train over as they crowded into the windbreak it created. They tried to scare the buffalo back into the storm with shouts and pistol shots, but, according to the story, the buffalo were undeterred. They rode the storm out in the lee of the train, and when it was all over the main herd moved away. Many buffalo remained frozen where they had tried to weather the storm. Some were said to have been frozen in standing positions. That story had always smacked of myth and hyperbole, but the night of that first winter snow with my future riding on the buffalo’s ability to survive, I gave it more credence than ever before.

Another account that I do believe, because I’ve seen weather conditions similar to those described, took place on the Laramie plains in the winter of 1844–45. Buffalo had been gathering on that high plateau ringed by mountains by the tens of thousands since the beginning of time, presumably because it provided more accessible food and better shelter than the surrounding plains. But that winter an odd string of weather conditions made the Laramie plains a death trap.

With only a year’s experience with buffalo I had already noticed that wind does not affect them as it does the rest of us animals. I’d watched them standing on a hilltop grazing in a forty-mile-per-hour wind as if they didn’t notice. I know they evolved to do that because strong wind clears the ground of snow. Where there is no snow the grass is easy to get at. Since the Laramie plains are world renowned for their windy weather, I imagine the buffalo were using that fact to make their lives easier. But in the winter of 1844–45 a snow came without wind. It snowed to a depth of four feet on the level, and then, for a brief time, the sun shone bright and warm. The windless snow and perhaps even the following high temperatures might have been anomalies, but the temperature crash that followed was not. The melted top layer of snow froze solid in the night and by morning a huge herd of hungry buffalo were faced with a four-foot sealed barrier between themselves and their food supply. Some managed to fight their way through the snow and razor-sharp crust of ice to pastures outside the cursed Laramie plains, but thousands died of starvation.

These were the kinds of thoughts that kept me from reading that night. The storm whistling around the house was nothing like the storm that killed those buffalo on the Laramie plains but those Laramie buffalo didn’t belong to me. I owed the bank no money on them, I had not bet my future on them, I was not counting on them to restore my corner of the world. The measly little herd in the back pasture was another story. I couldn’t afford to lose a single one. So even though this first storm was really a simple test for my theory that buffalo were still the right animal to fill that large-herbivore niche on the northern plains, I did not sleep well that night.

I was up before dawn, trying to read the outside thermometer with sleepless eyes through bifocals. The fire had died in the night and the kitchen was cold but the thermometer must be wrong. It couldn’t be zero outside. I squinted through the bifocals. One degree? No. Still in my underwear, I stepped outside and under a roof of crystalline stars. Wow. Zero? You bet. In five seconds I was back inside digging out long johns for the first time that winter.

By the time it was fully light, a layer of clouds had slid between me and the clear night sky. I got the pickup and the Rhino started and left them to warm up as I went back inside to find my felt pack boots. As it does on many winter mornings, the temperature had dipped after the sun had come up, and a fog had risen from the freshly fallen snow to meet a descending ceiling of clouds. It was below zero when I met Erney coming from his cabin. The wind had died but sixteen inches of light powdery snow lay like popcorn on the ground. It pushed up in fluffy billows as we walked to the shop like two old horses going to work. And like two old horses we did what we had done many times before.

“I’ll load up the buckets of cake,” I said, “if you want to hop on the Rhino and grab a bale of hay.”

Erney nodded. “You want me to break a trail or do you want to go first?”

“You better go first. We probably got some major drifts before the wind quit.”

“Bet we did.” Erney pulled his stocking cap down almost over his eyes. “Where we going?”

“Don’t know. Out in the back pasture, I hope.”

“Me too,” Erney said. “I s’pose they’ll be in Stan and Sharon’s corner.”

“How do you figure?”

“Wind was out of the northwest. They always move into the wind.”

We were standing outside the shop with both the truck and the tractor puffing white exhaust on us. I should have been moving to get into the pickup but I was struck dumb by what Erney had said. “They always move into the wind.” Though I had never noticed it, as soon as it was verbalized I knew it was true. I didn’t need to think back on the times I found the buffalo in one part of the ranch or another. I didn’t have to try to remember which way the wind was blowing. As is often the case, what Erney had said was simply true. “They always move into the wind.” Into the wind and through the storm as quickly as possible. It was exactly the opposite of cattle, who drift with the wind, prolonging their exposure to a storm that is killing them.

“Right,” I said. “To Stan’s corner. You lead the way.”

By the time I had filled the buckets with cake the Rhino had closed its jaws on a thousand-pound bale of hay and was walking like a George Lucas machine through snowdrifts two feet deep. Diesel smoke puffed from its stack and blended with the foggy air in seconds. The visibility was so poor that I had to hustle for fear of losing them.

I was once caught in a spring blizzard while checking cattle on horseback. We were not far from the house, maybe a mile, and I never thought I was in peril. But the icy wind and snow made it impossible for me to look into the storm and that was the direction I had to go to get home. I tried the old Hollywood western trick. I let the reins go slack on the horse’s neck, covered my face with my arms, and waited for him to take me home. Following Erney and the Rhino through the foggy white morning was like the feeling of moving blindly through the storm on that horse. High up on the tractor seat, Erney could see better than I. It was a question of trust, and though I was much warmer that morning, and had the comfort of NPR’s Morning Edition on the radio, I couldn’t help mixing those two experiences, even as one was happening. I remembered the lulling movement of the horse and the constant whistle of wind around my parka hood. Following the wandering of the Rhino’s taillight ahead of me, I recalled the feel of the horse moving around bushes and draws, picking his way into the storm— and, finally, the feeling of the horse coming to a stop, with a snort and the stomping of a front hoof. The wind and snow were still driving at my bowed head, and when I looked up, I expected to be standing in front of the barn. But we weren’t. We were standing on a storm-ravaged hill not fifty yards from where we began. The stupid horse had been walking in circles, just as a man would have.

That memory made me pull up close to the Rhino and blow the horn. When Erney stopped I got out and was surprised to find that the air, though thick with fog, was windless. The temperature was rising and I warmed up just trudging through knee-deep snow to stand beside the tractor tire. “What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m looking for buffalo.”

“Can you see anything from up there?”

“Some.”

I crawled up beside him, and though the visibility improved, we could still see clearly for only fifty yards. “We’ll leave the truck here until we find them,” I said.

There was more snow in the back pasture than there had been at the house, and with the extra weight of the hay bale on the front, the Rhino’s big rear wheels spun when we went through the deepest drifts. If we had been looking for cattle I would have been worried that they were bogged down in a draw somewhere. I didn’t think the snow would bother the buffalo but I did wonder about the legends of them migrating hundreds of miles in the face of winter. Those legends had been debunked in favor of theories of local movement, but in the case of the northern plains, local movement could still mean many, many miles.

As we rode the Rhino in enlarging circles, beginning at Stan’s fence corner, I was struck by how desolate the land was. When we had cattle we never left them in this pasture if we were expecting snow. The reason was obvious: there was not a blade of grass showing through the snow. “Hey,” Erney said, and pointed. “They been digging.”

An area the size of half a football field had been rutted up as if by hogs. The freeze-dried leaves of native grass could be seen as we passed over the area in the Rhino. “They got to be in here somewhere,” I said.

“They’ll hear the tractor and come running,” Erney said. We were used to dealing with cattle and assumed the buffalo would be hungry for the hay that the Rhino carried. But when they did come, in waves of six or ten, emerging from the fog, kicking up powdery snow with their lope and snorting shafts of steam into the icy air, they paid little attention to the hay we had brought them. As we had done thousands of times for cattle, we rolled the lush hay out in a long line with the tractor, but only a few of the older cows bothered to taste it.

“Hell,” Erney said, “they aren’t hungry. They’re just curious.”

The buffalo stood around blowing steam. Their thick coats still held a six-inch layer of fluffy snow from the night before. It stood in a stripe over their humps and down their backs, attesting to the incredible insulating properties of buffalo wool. Some ventured very close to the tractor, perhaps encouraging us to go get the pickup and give them a little range cake treat. The younger animals sniffed the Rhino’s tires, then tore off in a pack to pester the old cows who stood staring, trying to decide if they liked this new home. As we watched, one of the new bulls began swinging his head, using it like a hundred-pound whisk broom to brush at the hay and snow until he came to the grass below. Some of the other animals began rooting, too. They ignored the hay and settled in around us to graze, drifting slowly to the southeast, swinging their heads to clear more ground as they moved.