twenty-three
The next day, August 11, 2003, Roger and Veryl e-mailed everyone who had known and loved Charlie. “Charlie died last night,” their letter began. “Veryl and I were holding him. He was buried this morning in his pasture.” The e-mail’s subject line read: “With The Herd.” Soon, the calls, cards, e-mails, flowers, and plants started pouring in. Some friends had been moved to flights of Western poetry: “We are so sorry to hear Charlie has gone to the big long grass prairie in the sky”; “I’m sure enough tears have fallen to water his pasture”; “Love is the only gift we can give someone which they can take with them when they die. Charlie was probably the most well-loved buffalo ever to make it into bison heaven.” Most, though, simply expressed the sentiments that people whose lives are not spent with animals might find embarrassing, if not incomprehensible: “I hated to read that e-mail and have shed tears of love and loss for Charlie. . . . He brought out the best in many people (especially you two) and has left a huge legacy. We truly loved him and I will always remember his eyes, entire beauty and huge, eternal spirit”; “Helping him cross over to what lies ahead is the most precious gift anyone can give to another. What a privilege it has been for you both.”
Veryl had never seen Roger so emotional. When Charlie had gotten hurt, Roger had slipped back easily into the caregiver’s role. But it hadn’t been the same role as before, because Charlie was suddenly a diminished animal dependent on Roger for having any kind of life at all. In the time it took a scared buffalo to crash into a metal fence, Roger had gone from being an obsolete parent of a lovable baby bison to a starring role in a drama about the outer limits of human friendship with a wild animal. Veryl didn’t think he had ever given his heart so fully to anyone or anything—even her. When she had met Roger, he was a forty-three-year-old bachelor, inexperienced in love. He had given her more than he had given anyone before, yet there was a piece she knew he had given only to Charlie.
She did not feel slighted. If anything, she was jealous—jealous of the relationship’s intensity not because it left her out, but because she had never had a relationship with an animal to match it. She had loved so many animals herself, but none had demanded of her what Roger had willingly given to Charlie. She had buried a lot of animals and never known anything like it. Yet she alone truly knew what Roger had lost. Ethologists and philosophers argue endlessly about what animals feel, and whether they feel in the same way that humans do. In Charlie’s case, Veryl understood, it was a question of something else altogether: how deeply an animal can get a human to feel.
In the weeks after Charlie’s death, Roger would remember how sweet and clean Charlie smelled, like laundry fresh out of the dryer, and how Roger would pull out a tuft of Charlie’s woolly hair and hold it up to someone’s nose, as if to say that things in the world were not at all what you thought they were. And Roger would worry that he would never smell anything like it again. He would think of the phase when Charlie was getting too big to be left alone in the back yard because he might eat a small tree or get into an argument with a lawn chair. But most of all, he would think about what it was like to walk out the door in the Santa Fe morning, head down to the arena, and see this majestic animal waiting for you, and to touch him, and know that he was your friend.
Self-reproach compounded Roger’s suffering. He saw all his mistakes in retrospect. He shouldn’t have kept Charlie so isolated from other animals. He should have gotten Charlie up to John Painter at the Montosa Buffalo Ranch earlier in the day, given him more daylight to get accustomed to the other buffalo. Why had he hauled Charlie up to CSU in all that heat right after he’d reinjured himself a few weeks before? Why couldn’t the new horse trailer have been ready, so that Charlie could have had a more comfortable ride? Why hadn’t he installed a squeeze chute in his pen to make it easier to treat him?
Roger turned these thoughts over and over in his mind, even though it probably made more sense to ask how a man who had never been anywhere near bison before could nurse a gravely injured buffalo back to some facsimile of health. It made more sense to ask how he could care for him day after day. It made more sense to ask how he taught a buffalo to follow instructions. It made more sense to ask how an animal who shouldn’t have been able to walk again learned to run. It made more sense to ask why the buffalo had survived at all, and whether he had survived, despite the pain, just to be with Roger.
Roger funneled some of his grief into anger at President Bush’s administration. “Iraq is a tar pit and should always have been recognized as such,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of the New Mexican. “In the lead-up to the war, the administration spewed vastly inaccurate propaganda to a frightened public.... The U.S. Senate, the body whose most important responsibility is to declare war, was reduced to a well-dressed group of eunuchs by the totally political timing of the war resolution, putting the power of war in the hands of only one man.” Roger ended with a flourish that invoked the buffalo jumps of the past: “We have no energy policy unless it is attacking an oil-rich nation, no balanced environmental policy, no clue as to how to revive the economy and no one to resist the steamrollering of the average American by ‘conservative’ special interests. If this is the direction we want to be led, then there’s a big cliff in our future.”
The Taos Pueblo Indians, who had seemed so interested at the most recent meeting in giving, trading, or selling a few bison to Goodnight’s old herd in Texas, never followed up that fall. When the administration changed at the end of 2003, Roger would once again defer his dream about a ceremonial transfer of bison attended by the Indians and the governors of both New Mexico and Texas.
To provide Roger with a sense of purpose in the weeks after Charlie’s death, Veryl suggested they take a trip up to Yellowstone to investigate the situation there, which was frustratingly complex. Any solution would somehow have to balance the interests of a broad spectrum of parties: Montana cattle ranchers, the Montana Department of Livestock, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and the Interior, Congress, the National Park Service, Native American groups, the Buffalo Field Campaign, the National Forest Service, a group of homeowners just outside of Yellowstone who love seeing the buffalo in their neighborhood in late winter and early spring, and assorted environmentalists and wildlife conservationists. At one extreme, there were those who wanted to see wild buffalo herds return to till and revitalize the prairie; at the other were ranchers and farmers to whom the buffalo remained an unwanted nemesis from—and often unconscious reminder of—the past. As one Montana Department of Livestock agent said after 230 buffalo wandering in Yellowstone had been captured just inside the park and slaughtered without testing in 2001–2, “Let’s kill all the bison. There aren’t any real Indians left, anyway.”
VERYL TELEPHONED the Buffalo Field Campaign, whose headquarters is a rambling communal log house outside West Yellowstone. A volunteer named Justine Sanchez, a housewife and mother from Colorado, answered and listened as Veryl talked about Charlie and how much she and her husband wanted to fly up to spend a day in Yellowstone. Justine in turn called Dan Brister at his summer home in Missoula, Montana, and recounted her conversation with Veryl. Brister, who had just completed a master’s thesis on the history of the buffalo, recognized the Goodnight name immediately and remembered that three of his bison had helped seed the Yellowstone herd. Brister decided to drive the 250 miles from Missoula to Yellowstone just to show these folks around.
Early one morning toward the end of August, Roger’s Cessna Conquest started its descent into West Yellowstone. He glanced to his left, in the direction of Charlie’s birthplace. When they touched down at the small airport, it was barely seven in the morning and their plane’s engines were the only thing that broke the silence. Climbing out of the plane, Roger and Veryl had the feeling that they were entering the next stage of an unexpected journey that had taken them into the past and was now leading them into the future.
Dan Brister and Justine Sanchez were waiting for them. After breakfast in West Yellowstone, Dan drove them toward Hayden Valley, the heart of the park’s bison range. On either side of the road, fallen spruce, fir, and pine from the great fires of 1988 littered the hillsides like Pick-Up Stix. In the car, Dan decried the institutionalized bias against the buffalo, the intricacies of the different agencies they were fighting. When Dan started asking questions about their experience with Charlie, Veryl had to do all the answering because Roger was still too emotional to talk about it.
Dan suddenly pulled the car over to the side of the road, and it took Roger and Veryl a moment to see why. There, across the river, shrouded in the steam of a thermal seep, were thirty or forty buffalo. The four of them got out of the car and stood on the river bank, watching. It was the very end of rutting season and some of the bulls were wallowing, still advertising their impressive testosterone levels. One bull was tending a cow, making sure other suitors kept their distance. Two other bulls squared off to decide their pecking order in the reproductive dance. Another big bull cruised slowly through the herd, sniffing cows, working the room. An assortment of calves, their coats honey or russet or brown, wandered like contented children at a family picnic. But most of the buffalo stood stock still, seeming less like animals than bits of the inanimate landscape—outcroppings of rock and huge clods of earth. The scene, softened by the seep, had a mystical quality, like something only imagined.
As he watched the proceedings on the other side of the river, Roger felt a brief surge of relief. The sight of the buffalo, the progeny of those few animals who had escaped through the cracks of a nightmare 130 years ago, delivered him for a moment from his mourning. Charlie had walked into his life, told his story, and then disappeared, but the story, and these buffalo, were still alive, and the gift was still in motion.