WE FLEW DOWN THE mountain onto the prairie in Custer State Park and hung a right, to the west. Tourists were parked all along the shoulder taking pictures of a small herd of buffalo that had gotten out of the fence, which wasn’t unusual. Some of the tourists were out of their cars and getting much too close. Hadn’t they seen the yellow, diamond-shaped warnings posted every couple of miles along the road? They pictured a buffalo dumping a stick man head over heels.
“Check this out.” Quinn was pointing to a man in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. Snapping pictures as he went, the guy was walking up to a humongous buffalo bull that was lying down and chewing its cud. The tourist finally held up at about five yards but kept shooting as the bull rose to its feet—not a good sign. Didn’t he know this was a wild animal?
We got off our bikes wondering if we were about to witness one of those incidents where a tourist gets flattened and stomped by two thousand pounds of bent-out-of-shape buffalo. They’re unpredictable beasts, and can charge in a heartbeat. “Look out,” Quinn called to the man in the flashy shirt. “Object through lens is closer than it might appear!”
The guy looked over at us all annoyed like we were being punks. He took another step, lifted the camera, took a few more pictures. Ominously, the bull swallowed its cud and lowered its massive head slightly. The guy turned his back like you might on a statue and ambled in the direction of his car, unscathed. As for the bull, it burped up its cud and went back to grinding the wad on its molars, but remained standing.
We were about to jump back on our bikes. “Uh-oh,” Quinn said. “Monkey see, monkey do.”
A little boy, disposable camera in hand, was wobbling toward the bull. The kid looked barely four, too young to be into extreme sports.
On he went, closer and closer, herky-jerky on his chubby little legs. Where were his parents?
The little photographer stopped exactly where the clueless tourist had, and he sighted through his viewfinder. The small eyes of the mountainous animal were locked on him like lasers. What was taking the kid so long to get a picture? The bull lowered his head and pawed the ground. Uh-oh.
By now a lot of the people watching from along the shoulder were alert to the impending catastrophe. Shouts and cries went up; people were pointing. “Somebody do something!” a woman wailed. Somebody had to, but nobody did until I took off at a dead sprint.
Running full out, I heard the bull snort, saw the blur of its charge. I got there a second before the animal’s head and horns did, and I was able to scoop the kid out of the path of destruction.
The buffalo skidded to a stop and turned around to face me, mad as a one-ton hornet.
The monster trotted toward me, paused, lowered his head. From the side, someone came flying at me—the little boy’s dad? The man grabbed the kid from my arms, spun, and ran as fast as he could. The bull chased after him, stopped short, let him go. Then the buffalo swung around and glared at me. He lowered his head and pawed the ground. It was me he wanted.
I darted to the left—he cut me off. I darted to the right—he cut me off. “Nice buffalo,” I said, but there wasn’t anything nice about him. The beast lowered his massive head to show me his sharp, curling horns. He was practically breathing fire.
And now he was charging. This much I knew for sure: if I turned and ran, I was history. The world’s fastest human couldn’t outrun one of these things.
The bull was closing so fast and so furiously, its thundering hoofs shook the earth. The enormous head and horns were tilted down like a battering ram, its angry tail sticking up like a stinger. A couple seconds was all I had. An idea popped into mind like a string of pictures. The thing to do was to run toward him instead of away from him.
I was going to have to time this just right. My eyes locked onto the wide crown of his skull. Now! I told myself, and charged the charging bull with three quick steps. Off the third step I bounded up and came down with both feet together like I was at the end of a diving board. As my knees uncoiled, I threw myself up and forward, way forward, hands outstretched and close together.
Barely before impact, I was airborne, and nearly upside down. I planted my hands on the base of the buffalo’s horns and vaulted high as I could, tucking and tumbling in midair. The whole sickening length of the beast passed beneath me. Somehow I landed on two feet.
Quick as I could, I turned around to face the buffalo. He was whirling around, too.
Here he comes, I thought, but the storm in his buffalo brain had passed. The bull stood there a few seconds looking puzzled, then went off to join the herd.
I headed for Quinn at the side of the road. All the people standing around started to applaud. Then a bunch flocked toward me, taking pictures and stuff. One guy had his wallet out and was trying to give me a hundred-dollar bill. “You saved my kid! Here, take it!”
I brushed his hand aside, Quinn looking at me like I was crazy. By now there must’ve been fifty people crowding around, and I was getting claustrophobic. A couple of cute girls wanted me to pose with them. One said, “Could you, like, sign your T-shirt, and give it to me?”
“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Quinn from the side of my mouth, and took off. I grabbed my bike off the ground and swung aboard.
Quinn caught up as we passed by the famous Game Lodge where President Coolidge used to keep cool during the summertime. The shoulder there was extra wide, and Quinn was able to ride alongside. “That was nuts,” he yelled, “start to finish.”
“Insane,” I agreed.
One of the cars going by slowed to our speed, and the windows came down. It was those girls again, leaning out of the windows with cameras. “You with the hair,” one of them yelled. “Get out of the picture!”
They took pictures of me on my bike, then sped off shrieking toward Custer.
Quinn was riding at my side again. “Brady, you’re a total stud!”
“Knock it off, Quinn.” I stood on the pedals and raced in front of him. I was totally pumped. I couldn’t believe what had happened back there.
Quinn caught up. “Give us your T-shirt! Give us your T-shirt!’”
The shoulder was narrowing, and Quinn had to drop in behind me. We scorched the next few miles. “Stop, you lunatic!” he yelled finally, and I did.
In the shade of a big cottonwood, we sat and drank some water. I felt myself calming down at last. “Vaulting over a buffalo,” Quinn started in, “where’d you come up with that, Brady? You did a three-sixty, at least. You even stuck the landing!”
“I can almost remember…Oh yeah, it was from a library book.”
“A library book, eh?”
“Yeah, I was doing a report on ancient Crete.”
“Crete?”
“You know, the island in the Mediterranean. They had this sport that was like bullfighting, only different. It was more of an athletic contest. Instead of killing the bull, the idea was to grab it by the horns and vault over it.”
“You read that, and you remembered it?”
“I was really into the illustrations.”
“So that’s supposed to explain everything?”
“I guess.”
“No way! What were you thinking, trying to save that kid?”
“I wasn’t thinking, I just reacted.”
“You ran so fast you were a total blur. What’s going on, Brady?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the way you ran circles around me with the basketball this morning, the way you attacked Iron Mountain like a Tour de France rider. Both of those were amazing enough. Okay, you saw the buffalo-vault deal in a book, but that doesn’t explain how you were able to pull it off. What’s going on, you goofball?”
“I wish I knew.”
“How long has it been going on?”
“Just since this morning.”
“Something’s happened to you, Brady. This isn’t normal.”
“I know.”
“Well, do you feel any different?”
“I’m getting a sort of tingling all over, kind of like I stuck my finger in an electrical outlet.”
“All the time, or does it come and go?”
“It comes and goes.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Not really. I’m kind of getting used to it. You think I should go to the doctor or something? I hate going to the doctor.”
“I wouldn’t, as long as it doesn’t hurt. Maybe you’re a genetic mutant, something like that. You get to be fourteen and a half, and this gene nobody else has suddenly kicks in…”
“Just what I want to be, a mutant.”
“I wish I had it, whatever ‘it’ is.”
With that we got back on our bikes. The easy route home would have been to go through the town of Custer. We stuck to the original plan, hung a hard right, and started the climb up the Needles Highway, another narrow and twisty mountain road. Quinn led the way up, and we didn’t do any racing. We stopped at the top where the road threads its way through thirty- and forty-foot granite needles, then we burned down the other side of the mountain through the tunnels and alongside Sylvan Lake, the crown jewel of the Black Hills.
It was late in the afternoon when we rode into Hill City. Both of us found our eyes drawn to Grabba Java. The drive-through was closed, but Maggie was still inside, cleaning up. Crystal was outside at one of the picnic tables, drinking a smoothie.
Naturally we had to stop and check in with her. As we slid in on the other side of the table, Crystal asked about our ride. We said it was great, and then she kind of bit her lip and said, “I hate to tell you this, Brady, but Buzz and Max are really fried at you.”
I gulped, and the blood at my temples began to pound. “What about?”
“About that meteorite in your backpack. I made the mistake, I guess, of telling them about it. They told me this long, confusing story about you coming onto their place, them saving you from Attila, you claiming you’d come over to get back a rock that Attila had taken from your mother’s flower bed.”
“That’s all true, except the rock he’d taken from the flower bed was my meteorite.”
“That’s the part they were fried about, you faking them out, not telling them the truth.”
“What exactly did they say?”
“That you were a big liar.”
“Nice. I’ve really done it now. That’s the last thing I need, getting those guys mad at me.”
“I’m sorry I brought it up. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Don’t feel sorry, Crystal. It’s all my fault.” From the corner of my eye I saw Quinn looking at me like, You didn’t tell me about this whole episode, and why not?
Still trying to explain myself to Crystal, I said, “I guess I didn’t trust that they’d give it back to me if they knew what it was. You think they would have?”
She would only shrug. “I just hope they let it drop, Brady. Those guys can have long memories.”
Tell me about it, I thought.
Crystal said good luck, which was ominous. We got on our bikes and headed for home. We were five minutes down the Mickelson Trail, riding side by side, before I broke the silence. “I’m an idiot,” I said.
Quinn didn’t want to argue the point. What he said back was “There went our invitation to see those guys demo their catapult.”