A Buffalo in the House

Yellowstone National Park, six hundred miles north of Santa Fe, represented one of the few efforts to save the buffalo by a country that had presided over their destruction and then, for years after, still didn’t seem to care about them. Over the winter of 2001 and into the spring of 2002, it was getting harder and harder for Roger, Veryl, and a lot of other people to remain unaware of a situation there for which the word “irony” didn’t quite seem sufficient. More than two hundred buffalo in America’s last pure, wild, free-roaming herd—a herd to which Charles Goodnight had contributed three breeding bull bison in 1902—had been killed, not by hunters or poachers, but by employees of the Montana Department of Livestock. The clash in and around Yellowstone between the buffalo and “civilization,” between the ideology of wildlife conservation and the mythology of the Old West, was yet another disturbing example of Faulkner’s famous adage that “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” The immense political power of the cattle industry was once again being brought to bear on the largest land mammal in North America, and the result was one of the bloodiest years, and the bloodiest period, for the buffalo since the 1870s.

The Yellowstone herd had started as a handful of animals who’d escaped the slaughter and taken refuge in what had, in 1872, become the country’s first national park. Over the past century, the herd had grown into a popular tourist attraction that numbered somewhere around four thousand. Because of severe winters and the herd’s growing size, in late spring and early winter some of Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley buffalo migrated in single file across the park’s invisible northern and western borders on their way to lower-elevation public and private land in search of early grasses and better birthing grounds. Before spring turned to summer, they returned to the park. On their way out, however, they left Wyoming and crossed a few miles of private Montana land, and that’s where the trouble began.

Inside the Park, the National Park Service was the agency in charge of managing the buffalo, but after years of pressure from Montana’s livestock industry, the federal government had handed over management of the buffalo, once they left Yellowstone, to Montana’s Department of Livestock, an agency with no other responsibilities for any other wild animals and a strong prejudice against buffalo. The bias wasn’t surprising, given that the department’s job was to “safeguard the health and food production capacity of the State’s animals and poultry” and to “help minimize economic losses to livestock producers.” The successful evolution of the cattle industry, after all, had depended on the elimination of the buffalo more than a century earlier.

Leaving the swashbuckling DOL agents in charge of buffalo who cross the invisible western border of Yellowstone in search of food was a little like letting a group of professional wrestlers teach a class of rambunctious schoolchildren: someone’s going to get hurt, and it ain’t the grown-ups. Motivated by a trigger-happy combination of the need to control the local buffalo population, the fear of buffalo expansionism in general, and a largely hysterical fear that buffalo would transmit disease to nearby cattle, DOL agents killed 569 wayward bison during the winter of 1988–89, a dramatic increase over the occasional killing of previous years. In 1991–92, 271 more were slaughtered. In 1992–93, seventy-nine more. A quiet year followed. Then, between 1994 and 1997, 1,944 buffalo—more than half the buffalo population of Yellowstone in a given year—were killed, mostly by the Montana Department of Livestock, some of them in front of tourists.

The bad press that followed this surge of killing—shooting buffalo has been accurately compared to shooting a parked car—embarrassed the state of Montana, whose DOL agents then began to emphasize another tactic: hazing wandering buffalo back into the park by chasing them on horseback, snowmobiles, and all-terrain vehicles. They even used a helicopter flying illegally low, in flagrant violation of federal air regulations. The situation had more than faint echoes of hunting buffalo from the safety of a nineteenth-century train’s parlor car. Other bison were hazed and herded into capture facilities just outside the park, from which many then proceeded to the slaughterhouse without testing for brucellosis, a disease that can cause cattle to abort, but only under circumstances so rare that transmission of it in the wild had not even been documented. In the loud chaos of these efforts, panicked buffalo were routinely injured, or aborted, or were separated from their newborns.

Montana mounted a public-relations campaign to soothe troubled brows, but stray buffalo had triggered an atavistic response in cattle people that could not easily be subdued. As an official with the Wyoming Department of Game and Fish told a reporter in 1997, “If the public gets used to the idea that bison, like elk and deer, should be free to roam on federal lands . . . then it may lead to a reduction in the amount of public-lands forage allotted to livestock. That’s what the ranchers really fear.” Jim Garry, a naturalist and author and an instructor at the Yellowstone Institute, expressed the prevailing fear another way: “Yellowstone bison would be happy to leave the park, colonize the whole Paradise Valley, turn right, and take over the plains.” This is not paranoia, strictly speaking, thanks to regional planner Frank Popper and his geographer wife Deborah, who in 1987 shook the West up with their quite serious, though highly metaphorical, proposal for a “Buffalo Commons.” The two academics, supported by U.S. Census Bureau and other difficult-to-refute statistics, documented that a quarter of the area of the ten Plains states was economically depressed, depopulating, and agriculturally exhausted—and that the best solution was to turn that land into an ecological reserve that, with the help of returning buffalo herds, would return the Plains to its former, natural pre-cattle glory. “What we never counted on,” Frank Popper told the journalist and author Anne Matthews back in the early 1990s, “was the way the image of returning buffalo appears to touch on some primal apocalyptic terror.”

By the late 1990s, the violence against the Yellowstone buffalo had created its own opposition—a nonprofit grassroots coalition of Native American and non-native environmentalists had been founded to stop the slaughter and harassment of Yellowstone’s wild buffalo. The Buffalo Field Campaign was a grassroots organization that lived communally in a rented log lodge near the park on the shore of Lake Hebgen, which is situated in a little finger of southern Montana where that state, Wyoming, and Idaho meet. BFC volunteers staked out the park’s boundaries from sunrise to sunset in winter and spring, steering and escorting buffalo—their “sacred brothers and sisters”—back into Yellowstone when they could and putting themselves between the buffalo and the agents when they couldn’t. Patrolling in cars, on skis and snowshoes, they videotaped every DOL action they could, including their own occasional arrests. In addition, the Buffalo Field Campaign lobbied in Washington for legislation to protect the buffalo from being killed with taxpayers’ money; to get buffalo the legal right, like any other wild animal, to traverse private land; and to get the buffalo listed, finally, as an endangered species.

By 2000, the conflict was national news. ABC’s Nightline called the conflict “the most ugly, bitter, and protracted fight in the West. It pits the federal government and a rag-tag band of animal-rights activists on one side, the state of Montana and its powerful cattle industry on the other.” As then–Yellowstone Superintendent Michael Finley said on the program, “Some poor bull bison stepped outside and crossed this imaginary line looking for a blade of grass, and then someone either shoots him or drives around on a snowmobile and says, ‘We’re just protecting the cattle industry.’ That doesn’t sell. That doesn’t sell anywhere.”

But it did sell in Montana, where killing Yellowstone buffalo who crossed the line was considered essential to protect the state’s livestock industry not merely from largely theoretical competition for grazing land, but from brucellosis. Stamping out brucellosis had increasingly become Montana’s rallying cry. Brucellosis, an infectious disease originally brought over from Europe—by cattle, ironically—can cause cows to abort their calves. In humans it goes by the name “undulant fever” (for its symptom of fluctuating fever) and was once a non-fatal risk of drinking unpasteurized milk, but there had been only a single reported human case in Montana since 1995—forty-six all told since 1957—and none resulting from bison contact. Montana wasn’t worried about people, though; it was worried about buffalo. The bacteria is carried by bison, elk, and other wildlife in and around Yellowstone. Although Wyoming protected its cattle against brucellosis with a vaccine called RB51, which was about 75 percent effective, Montana had chosen not to, even though an actual outbreak of brucellosis would jeopardize its federal “brucellosis-free” status and prevent the state from exporting its cattle without brucellosis testing.

How real was the threat of brucellosis transmission from buffalo to cattle? After all, it was this threat that constituted the bulk of Montana’s justification for hazing, capturing, testing, and killing Yellowstone’s bison. The first clue to the actual severity of the threat was that the one hundred thousand elk in and around Yellowstone are also carriers, but Montana, which profited from elk hunting, was strangely uninterested in the threat posed by them. The scientific fact remained that cattle can contract brucellosis only by licking the infected fetus or placenta of a newborn buffalo calf—and in most cases must do it during the four or so hours that the bacteria survive outside a buffalo’s body in warm weather, which is when buffalo give birth. The odds of this happening would seem to be remote—and indeed they are. There wasn’t a single recorded case of brucellosis transmission from buffalo to cattle in the wild.

The most prestigious study of the problem, by the National Research Council, whose members are drawn from the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine among others, had concluded in 1998 that “The risk of bison or elk transmitting brucellosis to cattle is small, but it is not zero.” To conclude that “it is not zero” is to imply how close to that number the risk really is. None of the Council’s recommendations for reaching a risk of “zero” mentioned hazing or shooting the Yellowstone buffalo. The U.S. Department of Agriculture considered the threat of transmission “unfounded.” Even most ranchers acknowledged this. Even the Republican governor of Montana, Marc Racicot, admitted as much on Nightline in 2000. “I don’t believe there is a documented case,” he said before adding, with dubious logic, “and that, again, is the result of extraordinarily strenuous efforts to make sure that we eliminate brucellosis.”

The state’s “strenuous efforts,” however, did not prevent the tens of thousands of infected elk from roaming free in the vicinity of cattle—although the National Research Council had already recommended that “Any vaccination program for bison must be accompanied by a concomitant program for elk.” Meanwhile, upwards of $2 million per year was being spent to harass and slaughter Yellowstone buffalo to protect a couple thousand cattle—cattle that in fact temporally shared no land with the buffalo, since migrating Yellowstone buffalo returned on their own to the park a month before Montana ranchers brought any of their cattle to the same public grazing lands. And yet buffalo were being killed who didn’t even test positive for the disease. They were being slaughtered after testing positive with a test that was only 50 percent effective—that tested only for the presence of antibodies, not the disease itself. This meant either the animal had the disease or was resistant to it, a resistance it would have passed on to its offspring. Buffalo were being shot without even having been tested at all. Males were being killed even though, as the National Research Council concluded, bison with non-reproductive-tract infection—males, that is—“rarely, if ever” transmit the bacteria to cattle or to each other. Buffalo were sometimes shot within Yellowstone’s borders. Buffalo were shot even though, just to the south, in Wyoming’s Teton National Park, buffalo and cattle shared the same grazing land with no recorded incident of brucellosis transmission.

Obviously, Montana cattle ranchers would be happier if brucellosis were eradicated entirely, but just as obviously Montana was demonizing a single species. Not only was the threat of brucellosis essentially theoretical, but the Montana cattle industry that this modern-day scapegoating of the buffalo was designed to protect was itself a relatively minor cattle-industry player, accounting for 2.5 percent of U.S. beef production. In the process, it used more than $100 million in federal subsidies and needed more than seventy times the land base of a flatter, rainier cattle-producing state like Iowa or Florida.

“The most difficult aspect of the buffalo work is watching them die,” wrote Dan Brister, the Buffalo Field Campaign’s project director and the son of a Cape Cod fisherman, who joined the campaign in December 1997, shortly after it formed in response to the killing of 1,084 Yellowstone buffalo the previous winter. “I was riding down the trail at sunrise when I passed a group of snowmobilers. The guns on their backs were for the buffalo. I turned to follow them. Suddenly they made a sharp left and stopped; they had found the buffalo. I pulled my sled between the men and the buffalo. I knew that’s what I’d do. There was no soul-searching, none of that. It’s why I’m here. The cops cuffed me and the DOL shot all six buffalo while I watched, helpless. That was the hardest, the darkest, most frustrating thing I have ever witnessed or been a part of.”

THERE WAS NOW a fairly constant flow of friends, acquaintances, and strangers to the Brooks-Goodnight ranch on New Mexico State Road 592. A Girl Scout troop, the CEO and other top executives of Target Corporation, a famous Apache artist, and old pilot friends all trooped over to see Charlie. Roger showed him off like any parent does a talented child, although in this case the child’s talent consisted principally of coming when called and of licking people within an inch of their lives. Roger liked to pull out tufts of Charlie’s coat so people could see for themselves how clean Charlie smelled. Roger and Veryl learned only after the fact about some of his admirers. An Austrian couple who owned a house a mile away came up to Roger at a social function in Santa Fe and said, “Oh my God, you have the bison!” It turned out he and his wife had become very friendly with Charlie on their walks, which took them right by his pasture area.

Being the center of human attention suited Charlie well, since he had sworn off his own kind and was uneasy around animals in general—his old canine friends included. When Roger went to Charlie’s stall, Mickey, Flag, and Luke would follow, crowding excitedly around the door, desperate to be acknowledged, but Charlie barely noticed. He preferred humans. He could discern people’s good intentions. He would allow a string of strangers to line up at the corral fence to pet his nose and touch his forelock.

In his presence, many felt that they had crossed the gulf that divided them from the wild beast, from that dark, loamy, wordless realm where animals go about their ancient business. Charlie allowed them to experience that other world at such proximity that its otherness was no longer just a figure of speech. As Richard Attenborough once said about a close and potentially perilous encounter with two gorillas, “I felt as if I had somehow escaped the human condition.” In Charlie’s presence, it was possible to feel that you had just been let in on some secret, or been given a sneak peek at the cards, that some fear had been subtracted, some awe added. You had been cut down to size, yet made larger.

As Charlie turned two and grew bigger and healthier—he had hit the half-ton mark by early 2002—Roger had to watch him ever more closely. In the corral, Roger had recently noticed Charlie eyeing him and flicking his head back and forth, a form of rutting behavior, and had to beat a hasty retreat before Charlie could challenge him. Roger didn’t have to win, but he couldn’t afford to lose.

Several of Veryl’s and Roger’s friends urged them not to keep Charlie. One old friend of Roger insisted it was a question of when, not if, Charlie was going to gore him. Some felt that Veryl, the kind of woman who’ll stop to pet a strange dog, discover a tick in its ear, and remove it on the spot, was the vulnerable one. But Veryl felt that those who believed that Charlie would one day turn on Roger with a vengeance didn’t know Roger and they didn’t know Charlie. Veryl could remember only two times when Charlie had really lost his temper. One of them was the day he had smelled strange sheep on Jimmy’s clothing and chased the well-driller up onto the roof of his truck. The other was when Roger and Veryl returned from a twelve-day trip and Roger made the uncharacteristic mistake of saying a cursory hello to Charlie before heading into the house to answer his e-mail. Within minutes, Charlie was tearing around the arena, digging and bellowing. An irate buffalo is not a pretty sight, and Roger, realizing now what he had done, rushed out to the arena armed only with Charlie’s hairbrush.

Still, Roger knew it wouldn’t do any harm to learn more about training him. He and Veryl left Charlie and the other animals in the care of their trusted house-sitter and traveled to Scottsdale, Arizona, to see the premier buffalo trainer in America, Collin “T.C.” Thorstenson. Thorstenson had started breaking animals—mostly bulls and ponies—as a boy on his family’s South Dakota ranch. When he was nine, his father had purchased four buffalo, but T.C. quickly learned that buffalo were not tractable like cows or horses. Not until he was a young man did he have a chance to really work with an impressionable buffalo calf. Poachers attacked the family’s herd, leaving behind a three-day-old orphaned bull calf who bonded with T.C. much as Charlie had with Roger and Veryl. T.C. named him Harvey and added the Wallbanger in honor of Harvey’s sire, who had a reputation for trying to run through barn walls. By the time Harvey was four, T.C. considered him trained, and by the time he was seven, T.C. was showing Harvey off by riding him in rodeo roping events. But T.C. and his unusual 2,700-pound mount were soon kicked off the circuit by the other riders, whose horses were terrified. Not long after that, T.C. accepted a bet in Gillette, Wyoming, and proved that a buffalo could win a horse race, and the two of them embarked on a successful career of racing—and usually beating—quarter horses.

In 1990, T.C. moved his training facility—including Harvey and two protégés—from Wyoming to the warm weather of Arizona, where tragedy struck. Some oleander, which is extremely toxic to animals, got into a bale of alfalfa and Harvey, who had yet to live even a third of his life expectancy, was dead within a day. One of Harvey’s offspring, a seven-year-old, took five months to die from the same cause. The deaths were devastating to Thorstenson, especially that of Harvey, who had been T.C.’s son in almost every sense.

By the time Roger and Veryl showed up in Scottsdale, T.C. had long recovered from the losses of his prized buffalo, his business, and his beloved father, who had been killed by a bison he had trained. T.C. had built Buffalo Express, the only business in the world specializing in the training of American Plains bison. His “performance buffalo” appear in movies, commercials, sporting events, special events, and rodeos. Veryl’s first thought on getting out of the rental car and seeing the wiry, tough, lean Thorstenson was that he must be looking at the two of them and laughing inside. In fact, T.C. did spend the next hour and a half warning them that, if they persisted in “parenting” Charlie, they were going to get killed. Buffalo, T.C. reminded them, had proven to be famously hard to tame. In the wild, they were ferocious when threatened. By the time a buffalo calf was a few months old, it was already too late to overcome his natural aggression. In almost thirty years of training bison, T.C. had trained only four that he could completely trust in front of an unprotected audience. Then T.C. gave Roger and Veryl a private demonstration of his own long experience with buffalo. He lay under one of his buffalo, pulled himself up by the horns, jumped astride him, and cantered clockwise and counterclockwise. Then he gave Roger and Veryl a look that said, “Don’t try this at home.”

“Maybe you should hand-feed me more carrots.” Veryl knew that if she were not an animal lover herself, and didn’t love Charlie, it wouldn’t be so easy to joke about the triangle. As it was, she actually thought Roger had the harder job—he had to compete with their Jack Russell, who slept between them and growled hideously when they kissed.

As the third summer of Charlie’s life came around, Roger and Veryl had gotten used to the idea of living permanently with a buffalo. They ordered an expensive new horse trailer with living quarters so Charlie could travel in comfort. They had their eye on a ranch in Durango, Colorado, to give Charlie a home where their buffalo, at last, could roam.

While Roger and Veryl were trying to save a single buffalo, they increasingly felt in the background the presence of the others, the ones in Yellowstone. It was hard to cultivate one’s garden when the countryside was burning. One evening in late summer, Roger and Veryl watched some of the amateur videotape that the Buffalo Field Campaign had shot to document the hazing, capture, and slaughter of Yellowstone bison. In one scene, two agents in protective suits got ready to dispose of a dead newborn calf that the hazing had separated from its mother. The Buffalo Field Campaign cameraman shooting the scene questions an agent in the foreground: “Do you have anything to say about killing that baby?”