Seeing Red

     Fast forward thirty years, two children, and two marriages to my next brush with bison, this one on a sunny summer morning on Yellowstone's Specimen Ridge. 

     It's a steep climb up a narrow track to get to an enticing petrified forest protruding from the hillside scrabble, but my partner and I will first have to span a short stretch of prairie between two small buffalo herds, all heads down and moving slowly north. We gauge the grazers while gearing up with hiking boots, day packs, binoculars, and water bottles. Preoccupied with nibbling, the bison appear placid enough on this cool June morning for us to chance a crossing through the hundred-yards of grassland between the two herds.

     We're halfway across when a bull at the front of the rear herd glares up at my red tee shirt, stems hanging from his suddenly closed mouth. We freeze until another bull at the rear of the front group turns to fix a fiery eye on the two skinny creatures crossing his pasture. 

     Our West Virginia home is in black bear country so we know what to do when stumbling between a mama and her cubs - stand still, raise your arms to look larger, and slowly back away when she's not charging. This strategy seems ridiculous in the face of these two massive buffalo.

     One of the bulls snorts and paws the dusty earth. Shannon whispers oh shit, and we take off, binoculars clacking in our race for the path up the ridge. Breathlessly topping a first hill, we turn to see that the bulls are back to grazing, their shaggy heads bent to the little bluestem.

     As the day heats up at the top of the next rise, we pause for water and glance back to see what we should have known from the start. The two groups of bison have merged into the single herd they'd been all along.

     

Buffalo Breath

      My next close encounter of the witless kind came ten years later in North Dakota.  

     After a trying first year of teaching at the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine, I loaded up my little red Honda CRX-HF and drove northwest along any road that followed the Missouri River, hoping to find my own next direction while searching for the source of the major drainage for the northern plains. 

     Prairie was everywhere as I drove across Missouri and into Nebraska, but there was not a bison in sight, though I might have glimpsed dark specks in the dusk down along the river from my campsite on the bluffs of Niobrara State Park. 

     During my second sunset I pulled my two-seater into Theodore Roosevelt National Park and asked the ranger where I could see buffalo in the seventy-thousand acre preserve.  She pointed a tanned arm vaguely southwest and said that a back country hiker had seen them in a remote wash accessible only on foot or by a forest service road. 

     At dawn I drove along that dirt track and parked in the mud beside a trail's ford of the narrow stream. There were large cloven tracks all around the freshet but no other sign of the animals, so I ran up the trail in the direction with the most hoof prints. It was a lovely morning jog through bursting cottonwoods along the rivulet and up onto the still frosty grasslands, but the bison were nowhere in sight until nearly back to my tiny hatchback.

     I topped the last rise before the creek and froze in my tracks. Two young bulls were nosing around the car, obviously curious about the crimson object. That fuel-efficient vehicle only weighed seventeen-hundred pounds, considerably less than the combined weight of the two buffalo. They could easily tip it if they wanted it out of their mud hole.

     I gaped as they sniffed and licked for what seemed like hours but was probably only fifteen minutes. When they started wandering away I crept down and slid in, attempting to silently close the door. The two beasts plodded back with renewed interest, their one-ton bodies blocking the road out.

    This was a closer view than I had bargained for as one and then the other nudged the side of vehicle. I tried to be motionless on my reclined seat, immersed in their parfums de burly and only glancing side-eyed at their reddish shag, quivering nostrils, brown sclera, and sharpened horns. After a short while, I closed my eyes and fell right asleep after two restless nights of camping on the cold ground. 

     When I awoke with a start the bison were gone, and I already missed them as I drove out of the park and back to the big, muddy Missouri, eventually arriving at Three Forks where the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin rivers confluenced. 

     On the long drive home it dawned on me that there was no single source for either the river's or my own journey, but that it's better to stop and smell the musk along the meandering way.

Fight Or Flight

      My wife and I recently started watching the touching PBS documentary American Buffalo, and it's bringing back a perilous past with one-ton bulls in a stampede, a car collision, and a migrating herd.

     In early June of 1981 I was driving west to a research site with a fellow entomology student when we spotted our first bison in Wind Cave National Park. Tooling along out of the prairie preserve after a frosty morning, we spotted a cow and calf grazing on a sunny hillside beside a thick woodland. Our primitive Polaroid cameras couldn't capture their magnificent visages from the roadside, so we plotted to sneak through the woods for close-up shots. 

     We retreated along the road until out of their sight and then climbed a post-and-rail fence onto a sloping grassland pocked with hoof prints, heading for what looked like a pocket of field protruding into the ponderosa pine forest. Cresting a small rise, we startled the rest of the herd from grazing in that cove of savanna. 

     Time slowed as a couple dozen shaggy heads simultaneously turned toward us. Then a massive bull broke the spell by leaping into a charge. To our horror, the others followed his dark suit with frightening speed. Mark and I turn-tailed and ran for our lives down the hillside with cameras bouncing from their straps. He was an outside linebacker and I was a former running back on our college football team, but all that speed wouldn't have saved us from the thunder rolling down behind us. 

     The lead bull was two first downs away and gaining when he pivoted toward that cow and calf on the open prairie. The rest of the stampeding herd followed him, proving that bison, to our eternal relief, would rather run than fight.