Goblin Migration

Buffalo crossing the river on to their winter pasture

The Halloween images of excited, bright, and cheerful children walking colorful, autumn neighborhoods have always fascinated me. The kids are dressed as pirates, skeletons, ballerinas, political figures, and celebrities. I see doting parents standing behind their happy, rosy cheeked off-spring, as kind and loving neighbors dole out candy at the doors of their warm and inviting homes. Of course I realize that those are images created by advertisers and intended to boost the sale of candy and plastic costumes made by child labor in Asia. But still, they paint a picture of a holiday I could learn to love.

These Halloween scenes advertised must all take place in New England because the yellow, red, and ocher leaves are ankle-deep and seem to have piled up right were they fell from the sheltering maples, oaks, and apple trees. This is not a Great Plains Halloween. This is not a Halloween that would be recognized on this ranch. We actually have a lot of cottonwoods around the place and their golden leaves can be truly gorgeous – if they would just stay in one place. I’m looking out the window of my office right now, on the day before Halloween, and the leaves are sort of fluttering. They are not fluttering down, they are fluttering from left to right. They are all heading for the draw below the house where they will accumulate until the wind slows to thirty miles per hour and the wet sleet pins them down.

There are about six children in our neighborhood – the closest ones are four miles away down unlit, gravel and dirt roads. Their costumes are homemade – hobos and princesses – and every year we buy a bag of candy and fill a little basket beside the door. We sometimes call around to let the parents know that a foray down our road would not be fruitless. But for the last four years the porch light has burned in vane. Jill and I end up eating the Snickers bars ourselves – as a hedge against the freezing blizzards that have come to see that frail porch light as some sort of welcoming beacon. It seems that the first winter storm of every year falls dependably on Halloween.

Days later, in the local paper we read about the havoc it has wrecked on Rapid City, forty miles northwest. There is usually a special section with pictures of Darth Vaders, Cow Girls, and Michael Jacksons – all in hooded sweatshirts – forging through snow drifts or crowding into the school auditorium as an alternative to the picture postcard Halloween we had all expected.

There is a line in one of Loren Eisley’s books that has stayed with me for several decades. The young Eisley is describing watching a Missouri River catfish “coming back to life” as the block of ice it has been frozen within melts on his basement floor. The fish’s eyes are dull but alive. The skin slick and defiant. The gills pulse slightly. The tail flips slowly as if gaining speed to plunge back into the Missouri to fight the current one more time. Eisley is thinking of himself as a Great Plains version Henry David Thoreau, but when he falls under the spell of this ancient, eternal fish he is totally humbled and has only one comment. “This fish,” he said, “was no Walden pickerel.” Well, the Halloween that is brewing outside my window is no Massachusetts holiday. Here on the Great Plains the gremlins are not artificial, the season is as real as dirt itself.

A similar storm hit us on Halloween of last year. It had already been a difficult year. Coming out of five years of drought the summer rains has brought an unprecedented growth of tumble weeds. When autumn came the weeds dried up and broke off in the fifty mile per hour winds that hit in mid October. The weeds caught in the tall buffalo fence and when the wet Halloween snow hit the wall of tumble weeds and wire, it bent the fences over as if they had been hit by a careening pickup truck. The buffalo felt the winter coming and moved to the edge of the pastures closest to the Grassland pastures that they love. That Halloween blizzard piled drifts on the collapsed fences and Jill and I found ourselves out in the windy night, tiring to prop up the fence to hold the buffalo where they belonged.

We were a mile from the house and after we had jerry-rigged the fence, we let the pickup lights swing across a few of the lead buffalo that stood waiting at the fence. Though they were wet and crusted in snow, they seemed content enough. I knew what was happening inside them. It was time to move and fences, Halloween, or a couple of benign human beings in a pickup truck meant no more to those buffalo than the stare of a young Loren Eisley did to that Missouri catfish.

We had done all that we could. There would be no trick-or-treaters that night but already our Halloween had been eventful. We began to fight our way back over the bumpy, jet black pasture, through the storm, toward the ranch house. The pickup was struggling through drifts and mud and it was difficult to stay oriented in the dark and driving snow. Things went spooky and Jill and I both leaned toward the windshield, trying for all the visibility we could get. I was creeping along, doing my best not to over run the headlights reach, when Jill gasped. “What is that?”

I looked hard into the dark ahead, and the glittering snow shown with emeralds. There were a few to the left of us, moving with the snow, and half a dozen to the right. Suddenly there were great, shadowy humps of goblins proceeded by pairs of those emeralds. Scores of pale green lights glowed amidst the humps of what might have been whales but were, of course, buffalo. I stopped the pickup and two hundred buffalo moved silently around us and on into the stormy night. Their passage seemed to take a very long time and, once the hopelessness of trying to stop them settled on us, we sat still, enjoying this miracle of our lonely Halloween.

Now the snow is blowing again outside my window. It is a new Halloween but little has changed. There will be no children visiting us this night, but in the wind wildness is boiling like a giant cauldron. I will pull on my coveralls soon and drive up and find the buffalo, see if they are fidgeting along the fence line, and assess the chances for another migration of goblins.