CHAPTER 18

Weather forecasters in Los Angeles said we were under the influence of El Niño. They said we should be getting lower-than-normal temperatures and plenty of snow. We were braced for a tough January, February, and March, but it never came. We had a little snow on the ground for a couple of months, but that first November snow was about all the real winter we got. I was surprised that a severe winter never materialized, as they usually do when you least can stand them, but I’ve lived here long enough to know that the only predictable thing about northern plains weather is that it is unpredictable.

It was almost Thanksgiving before the stock dams finally froze solid. Most mammals need open water at least once a day, all winter long. In most places that requirement is easily met, but here, on some winter days, seeing to that need can become a task of Herculean proportions. I had tried many different ways to insure open water for my cattle after freeze-up. For several years I chopped a hole in the ice of a stock dam every day. The cattle would come running when they saw me chopping and stand at the edge of the dam waiting for the water to be revealed. They would line up in pecking order, knowing, I suppose, that if they didn’t drink within an hour or so, the hole would seal up again and the water would become as inaccessible to them as the H₂O on Venus. One year I tried a watering tank heated by a propane burner, but the bottles were cumbersome, expensive, and unreliable.

The last winter we had cattle, Erney and I put in a tank made of a giant earth-mover tire cut in half. We piped the water up from below and put an automatic float in the center that would keep the water level constant. Then we built insulated walls on three sides and an insulated top, leaving just enough water surface for one or two cows to drink at a time. The tire, of course, was made of black rubber and would usually absorb enough heat from the sun to keep the tank frost-free. The action of the cattle drinking every day would keep fresh water coming in and keep things from freezing solid. It was the best system I’d ever had for cattle but we couldn’t get the buffalo to use it enough to keep it from freezing solid.

For a week Erney and I would clear the tank of ice, then coax the herd up to drink. A few would nose the water and maybe drink a little but most would simply stand and stare at us as if trying to understand what we wanted them to do. At the end of the week the entire herd hadn’t drank fifteen gallons. A similar number of cattle would have drank 3,000 gallons. I began to get worried and called Duane. “They’re not drinking any water,” I said.

“Oh, they’re drinking.”

“No. The dams are frozen tighter than a bull’s ass in fly time. We drive ’em up to the tank but they don’t drink.”

“Oh, they’re drinking. You must have some springs or something.”

“They ain’t drinking, Duane.”

“Oh, they’re drinking. You go follow them around for a day if you don’t believe me.”

I didn’t follow them around for a day but I did go out in the recesses of the north pasture and backtracked the herd’s hoofprints in the snow to get some idea what they were doing. I found that during the buffalo’s night wanderings they grazed through the snow on the flats where they must have picked up some moisture with every mouthful of grass. I also found where they had pawed at the bottoms of the draws and opened tiny seeps. These are things that cattle would never do. In fact, cattle would have died in the pasture where the buffalo were thriving. We tried a few more times to tempt them to drink from the insulated tank but we were never successful. Finally we gave up, and to my knowledge, no buffalo ever drank from it again.

The winter was an open one, but even on the days when snow covered the grass, the buffalo ate very little hay. Cattle in the same situation would have been fighting for even moldy hay. But the buffalo only nibbled on the very best hay. They preferred to find their own feed, rutting it out the way their progenitors had for thousands of years. Erney and I managed to work on the fence project a few days a week. Before the ground froze solid we got the last mile of wood and steel posts set; that way we could stretch wire even in the coldest part of the winter. Though they need no extra feed besides the native grass, we continued to call the buffalo to us for a little range cake every morning to keep them tame. I felt like a Good Humor man driving an old, beat-up, brown pickup. No bells or music, but we’d holler and blow the horn and the buffalo would come running like kids emptying a playground. The 777 cows would usually lead the stampede. But once we started shaking out the cake they settled in to eat, chasing the younger animals away with lowered heads and explosive charges. The youngsters would run to the front of the line, following only a few feet behind the pickup. In the rearview mirror the scene looked surreal: a dozen buffalo in swirls of snow, jockeying for position like sharks being chummed from a five-gallon bucket, with a caption reading CAUTION, OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.

Well, they appeared close enough for me. So close, in fact, that some days I thought they might crawl into the back of the pickup with Erney. I continually warned him to be careful. “Let’s not let them lull us into treating them like they’re tame.”

“I’m careful,” Erney said. “They’re just having fun.”

“A couple of them practically had their heads in the bucket.”

“They really don’t eat much. They’re mostly curious. It’s the pregnant cows that are the pigs.”

We looked back at the herd spread out in a big circle and I saw that Erney was right. Most of the buffalo with their heads down, rooting in the snow for cake, were the old cows from the 777. They were eating for two and were getting as big as railroad cars. They would start to have their calves soon, and just looking at them, watching them chase the youngsters with cranky, maternal grace, filled me with excitement and made me proud. That day was perhaps the first time I stopped worrying about money long enough to become human again. We watched for a long time, and I found myself thinking how good one of the young bulls would taste broiled rare over a charcoal fire.

Spring on the northern plains begins with wind. After months of cold northwesterlies, you wake one morning to a breeze from the south. It is not yet a warm wind but there is something in the way it buffets you as you move about your day that is different. It’s March and you’ve known for months that the sun was crawling higher in the sky every day. The days have been getting longer, but until that wind shifts, you don’t realize that since the winter solstice in December, the sun has been gaining strength, too. The spring snows are still ahead but the gray ice that has gathered in the draws since October seeps magically into the earth and disappears.

One day you notice a tinge of green at the base of a bunch of crested wheatgrass growing on a south-facing slope. The days are still cold, with hard frosts at night, but hillsides that get more sun, though still winter-brown, suddenly look brighter. Even easy winters—like that first winter with the whole herd—are long enough to make you believe that it has always been cold. Though you’ve waited months, spring always comes as a surprise.

In the first week of April we were working on the last mile of fence that would surround the pasture where the buffalo would summer. Erney was on his knees at a corner post cranking the fence stretcher while I shook the barbed wire to free it of the dried grass. We were twenty yards apart and the idea was for me to pick up the wire and shake it loose from the grass when Erney cranked, but after a couple shakes and cranks, Erney quit cranking. I was standing there with the wire held up to waist level and waiting for a crank. But Erney had left the stretcher and was peering into a winter-dead chokecherry bush. I dropped the wire and shouted, “What the hell . . . ,” but he shushed me and waved me to come look.

It took a moment to see what Erney was looking at. Had there not been a brown movement to draw my eye I may not ever have seen it. “White-crowned sparrow,” he whispered, and smiled.

I smiled, too, because I knew this was the northern plains’ first bird of spring. This chance encounter confirmed what we always know but sometimes forget: that all things will pass, that tomorrow will not be like today. Suddenly, spring seemed possible. We recalled the flutelike song of the meadowlark and knew that it would soon fill the grass around us. There would be lark sparrows and robins, dickcissels and crows. Now we knew the ponds would thaw and the grass would begin to grow in earnest. We watched quietly as the little bird with the black-and-white-striped head flitted from branch to branch. It was a male, risking a frosty death in a spring storm to establish a territory that would entice a female to choose him for her mate.

Seeing that tiny bird lifted my spirits, but that afternoon, when we went out to give the buffalo their cake, the 777 females refused to come to the pickup. This had never happened before, so I immediately concluded that something was wrong. These were the buffalo that were due to start having their calves within the month. They should be craving a little extra nutrition; instead they not only ignored us but moved away when we tried to get a good look at them. I suspected the worst: disease, some sort of poison that would cause the calves to abort. The hopeful feeling the white-crowned sparrow had given me evaporated. What if these cows had lost their calves? What if we had no calves to sell in the late fall?

If that happened, my whole scheme would collapse. I would have to leave the ranch again, find work in some population center. If things continued to go bad, as with generations before me on this ranch, I would lose it. I’d have to move on, I’d have to find something else to do with my life. That night the words of “Night Rider’s Lament” came to me:

They ask me why do you ride for your money?
Why do you rope for short pay?
You ain’t getting nowhere.
And you’re losin’ your share.
You must have gone crazy out there.

The song is about a man who left family, friends, and future in the East for a life in the West. For a birthday twenty years ago, my brother back in Ohio sent me an album that included that song. There was a note attached: “How are things in the wasteland? Happy birthday, you idiot.”

I was used to being called an idiot by my brother. What shocked me was the word he used to describe my adopted land: “wasteland.” After I had observed the odd behavior of the pregnant buffalo, the idea of a wasteland rolled around uncomfortably in my mind and led me to T. S. Eliot’s famous poem. “April is the cruelest month,” he wrote, “breeding lilacs out of the dead land. Mixing memory with desire, stirring dull roots with Spring rain.” April, says the poem, teases us with the promise of summer, the promise of a new crop, of calves content on the teat. But if April is the cruelest month, with its promise of easy living, then the northern plains is the cruelest landscape for the same reasons. Throughout the entire Great Plains, from the beginning of time, people have lived an eternal April. We are tantalized by winter’s departure, April’s gentle rain, our illusions of what this arid land could be if . . .

But I didn’t think I was dreaming the way my predecessors on this land dreamed. I didn’t see fertile wheat fields where sagebrush grows. I didn’t imagine a castle built of carved stone. I’d stopped believing in princesses. All I saw was what once was: buffalo. If not the huge wild herds of the nineteenth century, at least a herd of a hundred roaming as free as the twenty-first century will allow.

But in that April when the calves were supposed to begin coming, the herd seemed to disintegrate. It began with the old females standing off aloof with their heads high, watching with fierce, suspicious eyes the pickup they used to run to. The rest of the herd continued to come for a week or so but then they joined the old females and would not come, either. By the middle of April the herd would take off in a hard, headlong run if we approached them. We were finally seeing the kind of behavior that I had feared. They were like a herd of thousand-pound jackrabbits and I concluded that if we continued to try to feed them cake we would eventually cause them to break through the fence. And if they got onto the neighbor’s land in that state of mind, we would never get them back alive.

There was still fence to build during the day, but at night I worried about the new turn of events. Inability to manage the herd was one of the things that I had dreaded from the beginning. Fear of not being able to work the buffalo—wean calves, vaccinate and pregnancy check when necessary, even move them from one pasture to the next—was the reason I had not committed to them sooner. It had been the tameness of the Gashouse Gang that convinced me that the stories of the intractability of buffalo were myths. Now they were acting as if they suspected treachery every time they saw the pickup.

Erney and I agreed that we should not take the chance of stampeding the herd by trying to feed them cake. They clearly didn’t want it, anyway. Since the grass was greening now at an accelerating rate, we convinced ourselves that the buffalo were simply full of fresh grass and not hungry. That’s what happens in the spring with cattle. They fill up on green grass and will not come for hay or cake. But they do not run away like the buffalo were doing. They simply stand and stare. Something different was going on with the buffalo. They did not want to be near us. They were wild, and in the way they moved, gave the impression that if you got close, they would be dangerous. Our plan was to move the herd into the newly fenced summer pasture as soon as it was finished, perhaps the first of June, but considering the way they were acting, it would be difficult indeed.

After brooding on the problem I could stand it no longer. Everything I had, and most of what I believed, was out in that pasture and I needed to know what was happening. It had been two weeks since I had seen the herd from any closer than a quarter of a mile, and I resolved to at least get a good look.

I took the ATV as far as the site of the old Courtney homestead. The buds of the feral roses that once adorned the doorway of the shack were splitting to reveal the startling yellow of the flowers. Behind them, a spindly lilac that I had never noticed before sported a single, small, weak blossom. It had lived there for sixty years without care, and the thought of it brought T. S. Eliot’s line from my lips involuntarily.

The wind was out of the north and I was in the southern part of the pasture. I’d planned it so that the wind would be in my face as I searched for the buffalo. I wanted to get as close to the herd as I could, and because of their acute sense of smell I needed to stay downwind. I left the ATV at the old homestead and walked north, over the grassy flat where the Courtneys tried once to grow fruit trees. I slid down into the draw that feeds the stock dam where their oldest boy drowned one sunny afternoon after working the wheat fields that finally blew away in the thirties. I crept along the edge of the buffaloberry bushes that line the north side of the draw and around the corner of the butte that’s home to rattlesnakes in the hot summer.

I figured I would find the buffalo in the far quadrant of the pasture, perhaps in the grassy patches between the clumps of old sweet clover that had grown so well the summer before. But when I slowly peeked over the ridge to survey that flat, there was nothing to see except two antelope. Apparently my stalking technique was working because they did not raise their heads from working over the new shoots of forbs on the south-facing slopes. But there were no buffalo, and I of course expected the worst.

From the top of the rattlesnake butte I looked over a great portion of the pasture and found nothing. There was really only one more place to look: a twenty-acre bowl at the extreme northeasterly corner of the ranch. It was the remotest place on the ranch, as far from the house and buildings as it was possible to get and still be on my property. It was a quarter-mile hike to the top of another butte where I could look down into the bowl and a quarter mile back to the ATV. I could have gone back for the machine and run over to the bowl in about the same time it would take me to walk. If I did that I’d have the ATV in case I needed to race off on a mad search for the herd. But if they were there the sound of the engine might spook them and I wouldn’t get the unsullied view I was longing for.

It was still early on a nice day so I set off for the hidden bowl at a crisp pace. Off the rattlesnake butte, across the wheatgrass flat until I came to the place where the old cattle cross-fence had been pulled out, then onto a gradual slope of little bluestem, and up the old missile-cable maintenance trail to the highest place on the ranch. I stopped there to catch my breath and to reassess the wind. At my feet was the hole left from the posts that had marked the communication cable that connected the ICBMs that were stationed on the northern plains until just three years before. We hadn’t figured out a way to dig up the cable, but we had pulled the marker posts to use in the buffalo fence. The hole was partially caved in but still a hazard. I kicked a few stones and enough soil to fill the hole and took one more deep breath.

The wind was still out of the north, so I had to skirt down the ridge to be directly downwind of where I hoped the buffalo would be. At that point there is a single bush at the top of the ridge. That bush is the first bush in the draw that runs down the other side of ridge into the prettiest little prairie imaginable. It is a small area of lush native grass with signature northern plains wooded draws. Chokecherry, buffaloberry, wild plums, hawthorn, snowberry, and fifteen other lesser species of shrub. The yellow grass, now wearing spring-green stockings, grew on the wide, elevated flats between the draws. I had not wound thirty feet down the other side of the ridge when I saw the first buffalo. I assumed that the entire herd would be below him, and after a few more cautious steps I was elated to find that they were.

The first buffalo that I had sighted was a mature bull. His buddies were ten yards down the hill from him. The next layer was the younger bulls, then the Antelope Island crew, the Colorado heifers, and, finally, the 777 females. Though I’d seldom seen buffalo right in the brush, where cattle are often found, the 777 females were very close to a line of chokecherries. They were the buffalo closest to me but my view of them was obscured slightly by the brush. Being alone and afoot I felt a tickle of fear. The wind was beginning to swing but still did not give away my position, so despite my uneasiness I settled in behind a serviceberry bush to watch.

The buffalo were generally separated by sex but a few animals wandered back and forth in their grazing, and satellites of younger animals made halfhearted attempts to get the older buffalo to play. Curly Bill stood near the top of the hill, at the edge of the group of mature bulls. Half of the females lay comfortably in the patches of bluestem, chewing their cud, a few even dozing in the late afternoon sun. I heard the gentle grunts of the buffalo as they spoke to one another of who knew what.

Hunkered down beside my serviceberry bush only fifty yards from the closest buffalo, with the wind coming now from my left, I felt invisible. When I first settled in I could actually smell the buffalo. Their scent was sweet and musky and I could imagine how such an odor must have excited the prairie wolves of a century before. Like the power of a tornado or the ocean tides, the smell of wild buffalo put my humanity in perspective and again it crossed my mind that the young bulls would be delicious. This time I thought of rubbing garlic into a hump roast and laying it over a hickory fire. But with the wind swinging, something primal in me felt a touch of discomfort. I imagined the thick blue cone of buffalo scent revolving away from me, climbing now up and out of the bowl and spilling onto the hardpan flat to the north. My own puny con-trail of scent was swinging, too, and soon would drift over the buffalo that stood on the eastern edge of the herd. I could feel my secrecy slipping away with the shifting wind. I wanted more time to watch the buffalo, more time to understand what had changed the psyche of the herd. But my scent cone was rolling in the wind like a powder-blue fly line and so I gave up watching the herd and concentrated on the old cow that would feel it first.

I watched her closely, feeling my scent straighten out with the shifted wind—the invisible fly line—and just when I would have lifted the rod tip for a gentle presentation, the cow’s head came up with a violent shake. She had been lying down but came up with fierce eyes and an odd grunt that set the herd into motion. Suddenly everyone was on their feet. There was a flurry of action over the entire hillside, and several cows actually started in my direction. Perhaps I should have been frightened but I was too amazed. My little herd of sweet, tame buffalo had become something quite different and I could not understand why. The bulls loped down the hill to meet the cows who had started up the draw. They were vacating the bowl at a run, old cows first and bulls at the back. I stood to watch them go, frustrated that my presence would make them react that way. But as the buffalo lined out for the top of the hill I saw that this frantic herd action should not be taken personally. It was basic instinct. As I watched the first three mature cows top the hill and disappear, I saw a puff of golden fuzz running at the flank of each.