It was after two o’clock in the afternoon…

It was after two o’clock in the afternoon when Colton, Lucas, and I finally got caught up enough to jump into the pickup and head for the center of the Pine Ridge Reservation. John and Judith Blackfeather had left a message on my cell phone asking if we would be interested in buying the last of three yearling buffalo bulls. I had picked up the other two the week before and brought them back to the Cheyenne River Ranch with an eye toward letting them grow up and replenishing their genes throughout our herd. The third one was supposed to go to another Lakota buffalo producer named Henry Red Cloud, but the deal went south and John was stuck with the last little bull, Still in a small holding pen in the middle of his ranch.

Cell phone connections are sometimes difficult so I’d left a counter message saying I’d take the bull and we’d settle on a price when I got there. We had done business before and so I was sure things would work out. My message said that we’d be there by three o’clock. We were running about two hours behind but John often joked that such arrangements were not on Whiteman Time but on Buffalo Time. What is a couple hours one way or the other?

The reason for falling behind was that we were trying out a new, junk pickup truck. When I went for the first two buffalo I had hooked the gooseneck stock trailer up to the old Chevy 6.5 diesel with two hundred thousand miles on it, and headed out. There had always been diesel fuel at the little boarder town of Scenic and, since the fuel gauge was not dependable; I had it in my head that I could fill up there. But the station was closed and I had to limp another twenty miles to a ranch and beg a few gallons just to get to Pine Ridge where I could top things off. By then the old Chevy was over heating so I had to stop along the road and add a little water from my water bottle before I tackled the seven miles of dirt tract that led to John and Judith’s house. It was dark by the time we got those first two buffalo loaded and, after a few stops along the route home to let things cool off, it was eleven o’clock at night when I turned the buffalo out in our pasture.

In the interim between the first trip to Pine Ridge and the second, I decided to retire the old Chevy. We would probably use it for odd jobs around the ranch for the next decade, but its days of hauling buffalo were done. We impressed Colton’s slightly-newer half-ton Dodge into service. He called it the Red Dragon and we had just gotten it back from having a gooseneck hitch put into the bed when the call came to come down and get the third buffalo. Colton and Lucas are both semi-gear-heads and one of the reasons we were late getting underway was their need to tinker with the Red Dragon. When we left the driveway we were making bets as to whether the Dodge would do even as well as the old Chevy.

But the Red Dragon ticked like a Swiss watch all the way to John and Judith’s. It pulled like a Clydesdale for the breadth of the reservation, up the hills, and over the sandy trail that leads to the modest buffalo corral where the third buffalo had been sequestered since I took his buddies the week before. I felt sorry for him when I left him alone because, even more than most herd animals, buffalo are not meant to be alone. He was supposed to spend only a day by himself but Henry Red Cloud, who was supposed to pick him up, had never come. “So what happened?” I asked after John and I had shaken hands.

John is in his seventies and looks very Lakota. He always wears a cowboy hat and usually smiles. But as we looked at the little buffalo pacing back and forth in his solitary pen, John pursed his lips and shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “Guess maybe Henry is getting out of the business.”

I nodded but didn’t look at John. He was standing with Judith who was about the same age and I knew that they were thinking about when they would have to give up their buffalo. Colton and Lucas were busy backing up the trailer to the makeshift gate that the Blackfeathers used to load and unload their buffalo. They watched the boys waiving and calling to each other. All three of us marveled at how they scaled seven foot high buffalo panels like a couple orangutans. “There were eight of us, you know.” It was Judith, still watching the boys. Colton lifted a sixty pound log chain from the back of the Red Dragon with one hand. He tossed it to Lucas who smiled and jumped handily out of the way.

“Yup, there was eight of us right around here that had buffalo.” John pointed to where the chain needed to wrap around the corral panel. “If Henry’s gettin’ out that leaves just us and the Knife Chief family.” I wasn’t looking directly at John or Judith because that’s something that you don’t do. But I saw the old couple’s eyes meet then drift back to the boys, setting the gates so that the little buffalo would run directly into the trailer. The buffalo was even more agitated than he had been when we first arrived. Now he jumped at the panels as he turned to make another lap. “Need to get him loaded,” John said and moved to where he could give the boys advice that we all knew they didn’t need.

“We’re thinking about it too,” Judith said. It was a matter-of-fact statement and I knew that Judith didn’t want to talk about the time when someone like me might be there to load up the last of their buffalo herd. “We winter in Arizona, you know.” I nodded. I did know that. I knew they had both been retired from good jobs for a long time now. I knew they had raised good, successful kids and that they summered at their little buffalo ranch on the reservation where they had gotten their start. “Hard to get anyone to watch them in the winters.”

The little bull buffalo came up the chute at forty miles an hour. He came to the gate that was chained to the trailer and took a quick right turn. He was in the trailer with Lucas shutting the gate behind him before he knew what had happened.

We had a quick glass of iced tea on the tailgate of the Blackfeather’s truck. Our trailer rocked with the little buffalo’s lunging, and John said we’d better get going. “He’ll quiet down when you get moving,” Judith said.

As the Red Dragon pulled away we waived to John and Judith who were going the other way. The rest of their herd was on a distant hill and they wanted to go over and have a look at them in the late afternoon light.

The Red Dragon ran like it had been hauling buffalo all its life. The boys joked about what a fine machine it was but I chose to believe that the truck somehow took its job seriously and wanted to get that lonely buffalo to a free ranging herd as soon as possible. We shot back up through the reservation and the corner of Badlands National Park. The sun was coming at the magic angle and the buttes and draws were lit up as they have been lit for tens of thousands of years.

We pushed on to Heart Table and down into the Cheyenne River bottom. Once on the west bluffs I began to wonder if we could get home in time to find the herd and turn the little guy out with his own kind. He had already been separated far too long and I didn’t want him to have to spend the night in the trailer. When we came to the edge of our property the colors were merging and the light was Russell Chatham smooth. We all knew that there was little chance we could find and drive to the herd before it was too dark to be sure that the little bull would go to them. If he got disoriented in the dark he might go right through the fence and keep going.

But two wonderful things happened: the herd was standing along the road that we were traveling and the light held on long enough for us to get through the gate and turn the trailer so that the first thing the little bull saw when the door opened would be three hundred buffalo and a half million acres of grassland. I stood with the boys at the back of the trailer and let the door swing slowly open. We could not see inside the trailer and so we waited, wondering if our buffalo recognized the dark shapes a couple hundred yards into the waiving grass.

There was no wind and for a full minute there was no noise but the distant sound of buffalo chewing grass. Then, like prince Hal bounding onto the stage, our buffalo sprang onto the prairie. He bounced tentatively, took one look at us over his shoulder and lined out for two smallish buffalo that had broken form the herd and were coming his way.

“There are his two buddies,” I said.

The boys spoke in unison. “No way.”

I nodded my head as the three rendezvoused in the no-man’s land between the herd and the trailer. “Way,” I said.