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.