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.