Category Archive

My passing interest in what is going on at Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch is fueled mostly by the fact that, like Old Clive and thousands of other ranchers, the economic health of my ranching operation depends to a large extent on inexpensive federal government land leases. For better and for worse Old Clive and I have some similarities. In light of Old Clive’s new-found fame, I am interested in what my evil twin is projecting to the world. So far it has been embarrassing – a gaggle of troubled, insecure clowns clamoring for attention. In a nut shell (and do mean NUT shell): Clive runs a lonely Nevada cattle ranch that depends on letting his livestock graze on government land leases much like the ones we depend upon. The difference is that he has refused to pay about a million dollars’ worth of lease money to the federal government. He has basically stolen that million dollars from people like me and you. It’s a great business plan, a good way to keep business expenses low, and a sure-fire way to gather likeminded, anti-social misanthropes to your ranch. It takes a village of those types to keep a good old boy from thinking about the fact that every other American ends up paying his bills and that every other rancher ends up competing against a guy who is gaming the system. I am also kind of a history buff and when I saw, via Google, that Old Clive had invited a guy dressed up like George Washington to speak at the gathering of “patriots” at the ranch, I tried my best to find out what this guy had to say. I searched all over the internet and all I found was a clunky, dysfunctional website for a small Texas newspaper. The guy’s name was Mark Collins. He was pictured shaking hands with Old Clive and he was, indeed, dressed up like George Washington – which made me wonder if the other “patriots” at Old Clive’s ranch were dressed up too. The teaser for the article told me that he had arrived after the action was over – not very Washington-like. The website asked me to click on ‘read more’ but that link did not work, so I didn’t get to read what Mark Collins said about Washington’s views on the Whiskey Rebellion where he personally lead federal troops to chastise a group that refused to pay a federal tax on whiskey. I hoped that the Rambo groupies that showed up to support poor Old Clive knew more about how to operate their weapons than the newspaper knew about setting up a website that worked. In the Whiskey Rebellion the rebels suffered some casualties. People actually got shot and, in the end, the rebels were made to pay the money they owed to the government. They were a little better organized and informed that the Cabellas-clad rebels that showed up at Old Clive’s ranch. The Whiskey Rebellion rebels had actually been soldiers in the American Revolution. They had likely read the constitution and had, in fact, served under Washington. I’ll bet they knew the jig was up when Washington sent the real army out to make them follow the law of the land. The keystone cop rebels that rushed to Clive’s aide did something similar when they held a news conference where they revealed that they had “good intelligence” (Yea, right) that the attorney general and the President had plans to attack them with drones. That turned out to be a fanatic’s wet dream and the whole thing dissolved into factional accusations …

It has been a whole year since we began getting the ranch ready for our daughter’s wedding. The reason that this came to mind is that we heard our first redwing back bird this morning and I remembered that last year, when the tree trimmers came, a redwing sang proudly from the first cottonwood snag I pointed out for trimming. The redwing’s cottonwood was just one of many trees that needed a haircut before the big day – which was in June. I thought that there was plenty of time but Jill and Jilian had a complicated schedule in their minds – an artistic plan that I knew enough not to question. The deal we made with the tree trimmer was that he would cut out all the dangerous and unsightly dead branches and I would load them up on a trailer and take them to the dump. He came in with two guys and a huge truck with a telescoping aerial bucket. At the end of the day the entire yard, driveway, and horse corral was filled with downed tree limbs. It took me most of week to pick up the limbs and rake up the debris. The next job on my list was to get the greasy machine shop ready for 250 people to enjoy a sit-down reception dinner of roast buffalo with all the trimmings. I announced that such a feat would be impossible but I was ignored. The last time that shop had been clean was the day after it was build. Stashed in the corners were at least twenty-five years of dust, oil, leaves, bird droppings, saw dust, old parts, plastic buckets, nails, balls of twine, jars of unknown liquids, deer antlers, and garden supplies. There was a lot of valuable stuff too: camping equipment, clay pigeons, plastic pipe, engine parts, coolant, starting fluid, bungee cords, log chains, rolls of barbed wire, fence posts, used lumber, and a couple raccoon traps. Suspended in the rafters were a dozen pieces of cedar siding and some roofing material left over from building the house in the 1980’s. Bats had been living up there since we moved in the early 2000’s but, luckily, they had not yet come back for the summer.  There was also important ranching equipment: a welder, an acetylene torch, an anvil, table saw, bench grinder, air compressor, drill press, two big tool chests, a band saw, and hundreds of scattered, but very important, hand tools. I tried pushing everything to the sidewalls but it wasn’t near enough room. In the end, it was all loaded into trailers and hauled to a livestock barn that would be off limits to the wedding guests. We rented a power washer and sprayed it down a couple times before we started any decorating. I kept trying to tell Jill that our home was a buffalo ranch, not a country club, but I didn’t think I was getting through. She had a vision of just what she wanted but all she could tell me was that it would all come together. She saw a buffalo ranch wedding as a continuation of the circle of life and she repeated what a Lakota friend had told us years before, “The buffalo and people are the same. We emerged from the earth together. We depend on each other.” Though I didn’t see how that connected to the wedding, but I knew what Jill was talking about. On our ranch we take care of the buffalo because they take care of us and, in that sense, it seemed reasonable to consider us as …

Jill and I invited three other couples out to the ranch to test Jill’s Valentine’s Day Dinner. It wasn’t intended to be the kind of Valentine’s Day party with paper Mache hearts and cupids hanging from the ceiling. There were no bowls of sugary candy bearing innocent, semi-secret messages: Be Mine, Kiss Me, Miss You, Crazy 4 U. These were six people that we had known for decades – parents of grown children – grandparents. These were old friends that we seldom got a chance to spend time with because, like almost everyone, we are all too busy. As we talked over minimal hors d’oeuvres, we compared the pace of our lives to the pace of our parent’s lives in the 1950’s and 60’s. They were busy people too. I actually knew the parents of several of these gathered friends and they were much like my parents who were owner/operators of a small construction company and a dress shop. When I think of my mom and dad, what comes clearest to mind is my mother cooking breakfast in the predawn darkness before she was out the door for work. I remember my father coming home day after day in the summer with his work shirt soaked through with sweat. But somehow there was time for silliness, to play bridge, watch football games together, and eat together almost every night. That was the main objective of our Valentine’s Day Dinner – reconnect, breath deep, slow down, and rediscover the magic that makes life so worthwhile. On the Northern Great Plains the winter days get very short and very cold. Though the skies are nearly always clear, a solstice haze can lay so thick that joy seems to go into hibernation along with the prairie dogs. It sometimes takes priests and priestesses concerned with the natural magic of food and love to dig deep enough to resurrect it. We had a full cast of priests and priestesses that night: wizards of design, conjurers of visual art, food alchemist, disciples of Herodotus, and dabblers in the written word. As we sat two by two around the table the moon rose full and huge on the horizon beyond the window. It occurred to me that none of us worked solo as our blue collar parents did. For all the lack of connection in our modern lives, each couple had found themselves working together. One couple owned a powerful advertising firm, another had dedicated their lives to the same weekly newspaper, another teamed up to write corporate histories. It was not completely clear what Jill and I were doing, but we were doing it together and so we knew how difficult that kind of work can be. It is understood that the richest vein of human happiness is the one that connects family and friends, and that vein is often revealed deep in a chaffing dish or at the bottom of a glass. Valentine’s Day was an excuse, but it was a good excuse because these were couples with a flair for the romantic, if slightly beyond the flush of young love. We were all too old to fake innocence. We knew the first wives, husbands, and kids that were still struggling. We recalled the rehabs, the failures, and the successes. But we pushed ahead, toasting the awards and achievements with Prosecco. These were four couples who, if slightly world weary, were warriors of life and filled with enough wisdom to sit close and freely tell stories that might embarrass more delicate egos. Jill started us off with a hot cauliflower soup that put a …

Seventy miles off the west coast of south Florida is a tiny cluster of islands called the Dry Tortugas – Dry because there is no fresh water on the islands and Tortugas because it was once a good place for mariners to gather sea turtles (tortugas) for food. Though I have never set foot on them, the islands have always fascinated me because they are renowned as a place to watch migrating birds, and because there is a huge brick fort on the main island that has a special connection to the Great Plains. The relationship between this confined, watery world and the arid expanses of the Great Plains are counter intuitive except that the ancient fort that was used as a prison during the time when United States’ most dangerous criminals were thought to be the Indians of the Great Plains. It was a time when imprisonment was considered only a punishment and, I suppose the authorities of that era believed that imprisonment on the Dry Tortugas was the perfect punishment for people whose main crime was their dignity and their love of movement. Surrounding prisoners who had spent their entire lives moving between small sources of pure, fresh water with nearly infinite, undrinkable salt water was as cruel an irony as naming the fort after Thomas Jefferson. Fort Jefferson is the largest masonry structure in the Western Hemisphere. The Dry Tortugas’ history in human habitation began in 1825 with a lighthouse intended to help guide US commerce in the Gulf of Mexico. The fort was begun in1846 and much of the construction was done by slave labor – another irony, since the fort remained in Union hands throughout the Civil War. It was decommissioned as a prison in 1874, became a National monument in 1935, and a National Park in 1992. Since I learned of the tiny archipelago of ten uninhabited islands and one that is covered with a huge nineteenth century fort, I have wanted to go there. I thought that this Christmas, when Jill and I spent nearly two weeks in South Florida, that I would get my chance. I wanted to stand on the edge of the island, on the narrow beach outside Fort Jefferson and look out across the bright, blue, coral reef that fades to black, deep water and try to feel what those Great Plains Natives felt. I imagine whole families standing beside the ocean, scanning the sky for a Wanblee coming to carry their spirits back to the plains. But, if you are not an eagle, it is a difficult place to get to and I had to settle for reading about it as I sat in the mainland sun. I found it odd that, in all the official Park literature, that I found no reference to Native American prisoners. Such revisionist history is never justified, but in this case the excluded acts are so reprehensible that I understood the impulse to leave it out of literature intended for people fresh from visiting Disneyland. But I wanted to see it and I was disappointed that I did not get my chance. In stead, I stayed on the mainland and read and slept for most of a week. It was supposed to be the first real vacation that Jill and I had ever taken – no meetings, no book readings, no calling on customers. We slept right through Christmas and New Year’s Eve. We ate enough seafood to satisfy a battalion of porpoises. I got through Team of Rivals and a biography of Ulysses Grant. But, toward the end of our stay, …

Times and places are fuzzy to me.  I have to think hard to remember when I graduated from high school and can only remember two words from Spanish class. I can’t remember street addresses where I lived for decades or the names and faces of old girlfriends. I recall very few details of Christmases past. Try as I might, there is no recollection of a single Christmas present I received as a child. There is a vague memory of carrying a candle at a Christmas Eve service at the Presbyterian Church – driven more, I suspect, by latent pyromania than religious fervor. I can still feel a bit of the anticipation of Christmas mornings in those years between when my father served in WWII and our family began to fret about Viet Nam. There was a neighborhood cat that my mother let in for dish of milk that was chased up the Christmas tree by our cat. I remember the tree toppling over, but I can’t remember the cats’ names or the color of their fur. About the only thing that my mind has stored is the aura of the Christmas Eve meals at my father’s mother’s house. Grandma Wesie lived alone in a huge Victoria home right beside our modest, brick house on the corner of Locust and Main. My father’s sister and her family lived a dozen blocks away in another modest house and so it made perfect sense to have the holiday gathering at Grandma’s house. In later years, the modest homes would be expanded, with two-car garages and patios build in landscaped back yards. And as my brothers, cousins, and I wandered off to lives of our own, the old Victorian that housed my grandmother would fall into disrepair. But in those most important years, between cognizance and college, that castle of a house would generate my only fully formed childhood memories of Christmas. And thankfully, those memories were not of simply material things – unless you consider food as merely material. In fact, although we had much more than many people, ours was not a material Christmas. I recall very clearly the Christmas Eve when the food, the conversation – and, no doubt, the plentitude of drink – was so intense that the cousins were gathering up their hats and coats for the trek home when some forlorn youngster pointed out to the adults that we had forgotten to open our presents.  That was the Christmas Eve that I first tasted oyster stew. For the Christmas of 2012, oyster stew will not be remarkable.  But for a mid-western Christmas in the late 1950’s it was about as exotic as it got. The stew was conjured up by my adventurous mother. She and my father had tasted them when they were stationed on the east coast during the war. Recently, she had been seditiously studying a great, heavy book that was so revolutionary that it was effectively banned in our mid-century Ohio hometown. The Gourmet Cookbook stood elegant on the shelf above her stove like a tomb on alchemy and I marveled at the fake, gold-leaf and the wear that was already showing on the embossed cover. I have no idea where she got the oysters. No doubt, in the middle of the country before there was anything like flown-in seafood, they were not at their peak of freshness. But the details of the oysters’ origins have faded to obscurity. What I remember is the stew itself – the way the butter floated on the rich, pungent broth, the nuggets of goodness dredged from the bottom …

Sitting on the couch of our television room, watching CNN’s Election coverage, I was oddly reminded of the first Thanksgiving. There was no pumpkin pie, squash, roast venison, or Indian corn. But there were a couple of Indians. Rocke Afraid of Hawk is friend of mine from the 1970s when we were very young men working for a South Dakota rancher for few bucks an hour. We knew almost nothing about the world and the world knew even less about us. Last Tuesday night we were a couple old men, sitting in the dark, watching Wolf Blitzer and John King operated brilliant touch-screen devices that were supposed to explain it all. My favorite dog of all time laid on the couch with me, his head on my lap, his world at total peace. Rocke sat in a big chair to my left and only the color-show of John King’s magic illuminated his classic Lakota face. On the chair to my right sat Rocke’s twenty-something relative, Mathew, who had been helping sort buffalo at the Cheyenne River Ranch all day long. They had been the first to vote in their precinct in Cherry Creek, on the Cheyenne River Reservation that morning, before they piled into their very old pickup and came down to the buffalo roundup. Everyone was worn out. Jill was still at work, hustling to get out of the office in time to be one of the last to vote in Rapid City and make it back to join our TV vigil. It was serendipity that they were there on that day, more a question of chaotic planning than anything intentional. Though the fact that Obama was getting re-elected added to the excitement, the main stimulus for Rocke Afraid of Hawk was that he was about to become a buffalo rancher. A Wild Idea crew had been working for a week to set up corrals and organize the transfer of 175 buffalo from our herd to Rocke and his family. We had been building up the herd for over eighteen months, which is how long it took for the BIA and Tribal authorities to figure out what was required for Rocke to actually own a herd of buffalo on the reservation. We were still working on finding him financing and because Rocke owned almost nothing, it was impossible in the normal markets. Despite the fact that the USDA Department of Economic Development takes credit for loan guarantees for just such projects, we had been turned away from several banks with the smug smiles and shaking heads of old fashioned racism. Luckily, we had found a benefactor who pounded a big fist on a banker’s desk and vowed that if he couldn’t find a bank that would meet its responsibility, that he would do it himself. Sitting in that darkened room I wondered if Rocke knew how many people were crawling out on a limb for him. He is a fine man, but he is not a man of John King’s world, so I supposed that he might not understand. In fact, Rocke is a very quiet man – respected as an elder even before he reached the usual age for such honors. But he has always talked his heart with me and that night was no exception. There were a couple beers on the coffee table in front of us, and along with the excitement of the day they might have contributed to the comfort of the situation. We began by simply trying to listen to CNN’s coverage of the election. Mathew had proved himself a good worker that …

Last week I drove up to the northwestern corner of North Dakota for two reasons. I wanted to spend a few days hunting grouse with three good friends and I wanted to see the effects of America’s latest great oil boom. My only experience in that country between the Missouri River and the Canadian boarder was to zip through it in the dead of night on my way to Saskatchewan. In truth, I had avoided it for the last ten years because of the oil boom – like avoiding a visit to a hospitalized loved one. I had been looking forward to the trip for most of a year. We were four busy guys who didn’t take enough time to spend together. We needed to unwind and we were headed for the perfect place to get that job done. It is the prairie pothole region of North America, famous for thousands of undrained ponds, ringed with native grass and laying placid under a sky made immense by the lack to trees. I am not a religious man but, when I thought of the trip to come, I could hear the poet in my ear, “…making me to lie down in green pastures, leading me beside the still water…” Erney and I had been working the bird dogs in harnesses to get them into shape so they were ready to run hard for an hour or two at a crack, even in the warm weather of late September. But, as usual, I had left all other preparations to the last minute. On Sunday morning I found myself running around, looking for hunting clothes, cooler, water jugs, shotgun, shells, and a map of North Dakota. I can drive by memory to lots of places in North Dakota but, for me, the far northwestern corner is a terra incognita. My wild guess at driving time was six hours and it was already noon. I dug through the Rubbermaid trashcan in my office where all the maps are kept. I was sure that there were several maps of North Dakota in there somewhere, but I came up empty handed. Time was ticking away. Erney had already loaded the dogs, the dog food, the stake-out chain, and the combs for extracting burrs from the setters’ coats and was standing near the pickup tapping his foot. When I yelled up stairs to ask Jill if she had seen a map of North Dakota, she yelled back that I was nuts. “Google it,” she said. She knew perfectly well that I had no idea how to produce one of those nifty little lists of routs, turns, and times that lead millions of people to their destinations everyday. She also knew that I had little faith in such sterile instructions. But there was a challenge in her voice that would not allow me to ask her to do it for me. I sat down at the computer and – tap, tap, tap – I had the directions to get to where I was supposed to meet my friends. I was incredibly proud of myself and waived the paper as I kissed Jill goodbye. I drove to Bowman, North Dakota without consulting my Google map or list. Thirty-five years before I had worked in the northwest corner of South Dakota for the South Dakota Game and Fish Department and so all the country between our ranch and Bowman was as familiar as my backyard. In those days I was the state “raptor specialist” based in the most sparsely populated county in South Dakota. Back in the 1970s, being the …

… and it’s not just the heat. In this catastrophic summer of 2012 a rancher’s mind races like an antelope trapped in a highway median. Sure, the unprecedented lack of rain and the record heat is an act of God, but that does not let you completely off the hook. You entered into a relationship with this land and you knew what you were getting into. We have always taken pride in the management of this ranch and have gone to great efforts to show the land, the buffalo, and our management to anyone who is truly interested. But this summer the joy has gone out of those tours. By actual surveys, the population of ground nesting birds is a fraction of what it has been in the proceeding few years. This year, the fresh water springs that have run out of our hillsides for eons show only a hint of green. The lawn is wasted with brow grass and invasive weeds. The fruit trees droop and the garden just can’t grow with rationed well water. In the fields where we planted expensive native grasses, the tiny shoots lay dormant. And, the prairie dog towns blow dust when the hot wind blows. By the end of August, Jill and I decided to stop the ranch tours for two reasons. First, the dryness creates a constant fire danger, and the second reason (and perhaps the bigger of the two), is that the condition of the ranch is depressing, an embarrassment for those of us who have invested so much in making it a laboratory for restoration. Except for one, the summer pastures are used up. I was saving that one for the sharp-tailed grouse to use this winter for hunting with my falcon. But it looks like the grouse will have to winter in the the river bottoms and feed off the cottonwood buds. They will survive, and likely thrive as they always have. The buffalo too will thrive. They look much better than the land and after they have used up that last pasture, they will move out onto the National Grasslands where the grass is still good. The cattle that summer on the Grasslands drifted out of the hills a couple of months ago to be near the river where they could get water during that string of days when the temperature rose far above a hundred degrees. The highlands are practically untouched and the buffalo will revel in the grass that nature has stored for any animal with the capacity to travel for their water. Life will go on naturally for the inhabitants of this land who have evolved to handle such hardships. The rest of us will have to learn. Learning is the point of our little ranch tours and that is why, when a group of interested and influential people contacted us for a September tour we felt torn. These were the kind of people whose understanding of our land could be important. Helping them to see the beauty of the Plains, the ecological importance of the biome, the value of old and new human cultures, was something that we very much wanted to do. We wanted to shine a favorable light on the Northern Great Plains but there had never been a more difficult time to find the beauty. We delayed getting back to them. As we lamented the lost opportunity we talked about the drought and admitted that it was hardly unprecedented. Beginning with the very earliest historical records, the ravages of dryness are well documented. From tree ring studies, to Lakota winter counts, to …

A few years ago a distant neighbor tried to antagonize me by mocking the concept of man-made climate change. He knew that I was worried about such things and he seemed to be drawing a distinction between himself and me for the benefit of friends who were moving livestock up a loading chute. It was a friendly mocking on a February day that should have been hovering in the single digits above zero. But instead of the normal mid-winter, polar conditions, the day was fifty degrees and all of us were working in our shirt sleeves. “Oh yea,” my neighbor said. “This global warming is a real bad deal. I just hate days like this.” I didn’t rise to his bait but he kept going. “It’ll change our way of life on the Great Plains.” There was a little laughter and most of the heads nodded in tacit agreement. I did not engage him in debate because I knew it was hopeless. But I did look at him to try to determine if he was being serious or just parroting the attitudes of the corporate defenders in Congress and the safely arrogant talk show hosts. My neighbor is a little chubby, tries hard to be jovial, and likes to be viewed as wise. But he is not as practiced as the people in Washington and his eyes didn’t engage mine. They flitted over the faces of our friends, searching for approval. When he found it, he became energized, and basked in the attention. “I might have to take my insulated coveralls to the Salvation Army.” This got him a few more laughs and the way he puffed up was hard to watch, because he is not a stupid man. He knows what an increase of just few degrees could do to the midsection of America. He knows perfectly well that a glorious, fertile growing season depends on a tough winter, that the productive temperature range for almost all plants and animals is very narrow, that a fractional reduction in rainfall could upset balances that the whole world depends on. Of course, if he were ever pinned down on any of these points, he would take shelter in the standard sand pile of “It isn’t proven. It’s just a theory.” He may even know that by such reckoning the lethal nature of a bullet to the brain is just a theory until you pull the trigger. For the years since that day when I was mocked for my worry over climate change I have often wondered if my neighbor, or the public officials that he mimicked, ever woke up in the middle of the night wondering – what if. What if we really are creating a deadly change in the climate that sustains us? Do those people secretly pace their kitchen floors at three in the morning, or do they simply shrug their shoulders, conclude that the short-term increase in wealth is worth it, and go back to sleep? There have been several nights in this summer of 2012 when I know that my neighbor did not sleep because I saw him out on a volunteer fire truck fighting prairie fires. It is not even August and already hundreds of thousands of acres of the Northern Great Plains have burned. The summer of 2012 will go down in the record books as one of the hottest and driest. It may even end up as the hottest and driest in recorded history. It is a disconcerting record and even more disconcerting to think that 2012 record might not hold for long. Of …

The days are too hot and dry and nature shuts down after its spring frenzy and before the kinetics of autumn. The ducks are flightless this time of year and so the skies are oddly vacant. At this latitude, the only window of natural activity occurs just after four o’clock in the morning and lasts for only an hour or so. The bright spot in my July is that it is the time when young peregrine falcons learn to fly, the time that the birds destined to become hunting falcons form bonds with their primary hunting partner. It is the time that young falcons learn the ways of man and when men re-learn the rhythms of wildness. It is one of the few times that modern man is privileged to reconnect intimately with the greater world to which we all belong. This July I have again been fortunate enough to have a young peregrine falcon come into my life. We spend hours each day getting used to each other. I carry him on my fist, I feed him patiently, I ease the hood on and off a thousand times. He is the best part of my July. He is my swimming pool, my golf outing, my picnic in the park. He is my most immediate link to the 99.9% of this world that is non-human. Rodger Tory Peterson was one of America’s finest naturalists. He was mostly famous for his series of Field Guides but he was also a teacher, artist, lecturer, winner of many honors and awards including nominations for the Nobel Prize. As Paul R. Ehrlich said, “In this century, no one has done more to promote an interest in living creatures than Rodger Troy Peterson.” I look up to Rodger Troy Peterson for many reasons, but mostly for penning this quote: “Man has emerged from the shadows of antiquity with a Peregrine on his wrist. Its dispassionate brown eyes, more than any other bird, have been witness to the struggle for civilization, from the squalid tents on the steppes of Asia thousands of years ago, to the marble halls to European Kings in the seventeenth century.” It is a quote from his 1948 book, Birds Over American, and I read and reread it every July that I am training a new peregrine falcon. I sit in the early morning shadows of our yard, coaxing the bird to take his meals on my fist and I wonder what those “dispassionate brown eyes” are making of this little buffalo ranch in the center of the Northern Great Plains of North America. I wonder if he sees this aging, bald man who offers him tidbits to win his trust as advanced beyond the Mongols of those squalid tents of Asia, or only a human with atavistic tendencies. What vision of the world do I share with this time traveler? As modern humans go, I may understand more than most of what drives this pound and half thunderbolt with the laser eyesight and the ability to thrive in a savage world. We sit quietly in the front yard with the old English Setter, laying watchful not ten feet away. On the other side, two horses hang there heads over the coral fence. Their eyes are half shut and their tails are already beginning to switch back and forth, in anticipation of the buggy July day that is coming on hot. Here rests the great triumvirate of the first tier of the struggling civilization that Rodger Troy Peterson spoke about. Only slightly apart from the alliance of humans, dogs, and horses is …

For Ed Abbey a park, a forest, a stretch of private land that has been spared the ravages of unfettered capitalism is wilderness. It did not need a federal designation or an act of congress to qualify. Indeed for most of us, wilderness is like art – we may not know the definition, but we know it when we see it. In fact, we know it even when we don’t see it. Ed said, “A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, power lines, and right-angle surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.” I have two old friends that have never spent much time in cities. They are not criminals, drug addicts, or in need of psychoanalysis. They are just two old men in their middle seventies who have worked hard in agricultural communities since they were boys. They are retired now and once in a while the one who lives high in the Black Hills with a younger woman, comes down to the prairie to visit the one who, for thirty years, has lived in a cabin on our ranch. They are good friends even though to stand outside the prairie cabin and listen to them talk you might have your doubts. They are both bullheaded, set in their ways, and hard of hearing. As I listened at the door, I would have sworn that they were having a fight: the voices were loud and the points of view seemed entrenched. They were trying to decide whether or not they should drive over to see Yellowstone National Park. As I leaned against the door, listening, I was at first amazed to learn that neither of them had experienced more than a glancing encounter with our first National Park: Yellowstone. This did not preclude claims of expertise and knowledge about the park. Gervase had had a brother who once lived in Livingston, Montana and Erney, who was laid low by a stroke a decade ago and spends much of his time in a reclining chair watching television, assured Gervase that he had, “watched every nature show ever filmed in Yellowstone at least twenty times.” As I listened, I became excited to learn that they were on the verge of setting a date for their first real visit to the park. In the late seventies and early eighties I spent a good portion of each summer in Yellowstone. I was lucky enough to work with State and Park Service biologists releasing peregrine falcons in and around the park. I spent many days hiking along the rivers and high cliffs of the area. I slept a hundred nights under the Yellowstone sky. We were some of the first people into the park when the snow receded enough to move around and I knew that the mid-March date they were talking about was very early. When I stepped through the cabin door, I was greeted with smiles and hellos. I hated to bring a cautionary message. “If you guys are going to Yellowstone, I’d check to see if the roads are open.” Instinctually we all looked out the window at the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands where the little snow we had received in the winter was long gone. To defend myself, I said. “Those passes are a mile higher than here. I don’t want you …

The Sunday New York Times recently held an essay contest asking whether eating meat can be ethical. As conscious carnivores,this an issue we often discuss. The contest inspired Dan to share his thinking on this topic and explain why eating meat that is raised in humanely and in a responsible manner is in fact ethical. Below is Dan’s article as well as a link to the New York Times contest winner: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/magazine/the-ethicist-contest-winner-give-thanks-for-meat.html?ref=magazine My perspective on the ethics of eating meat is anchored in 500,000 square miles known as the American Great Plains. I argue that raising free-range animals and eating their meat is a critical way to protect that vast midsection of our country from destruction. The literature concerning our ethical relationship with animals contains little about eating animals per se. I find reasoned arguments on the ethical treatment of animals that render modern, factory-farming indefensible. Confinement feeding and production slaughterhouses are clearly ethically bankrupt. But eating animals and poor treatment are not necessarily linked. The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is my neighbor and we both raise free-roaming buffalo. We have sacred codes concerning how animals are harvested and the importance of a bio-diverse landscape. We view buffalo and their eco-system as a single thing and we know that neither can survive without the other. Cruelty to animals can never be ethical, but cruelty and death are not synonymous. The subtext of anti-meat eating rhetoric is that death is abhorrent and that killing is not ethical. But death is inevitable. The only real options concerning death are when, where, and how, an individual dies. Indeed, the humane harvest of individuals to preserve an entire ecosystem must be considered the ethical choice. A species can regenerate if the community is healthy but communities that perish, are lost forever. The tens of thousands of plants, invertebrate, and vertebrate species that are indigenous to the Great Plains are, for the most part still intact. Their co-evolution make them co-dependent and so, from the smallest microbe to a two-thousand pound buffalo, one species’ survival depends on the next. The perennial grasses that are native to the Great Plains are unique in their ability to sequester billions of tons of carbon. The native grazers keep this process functioning and almost any other land use would release that carbon and cause unimaginable problems for the entire world. This seething sea of grass can only survive if its suite of plants and animals remain whole. Aldo Leopold, one of our country’s premier philosophers, explains his famous land ethic in a simple sentence: “A thing is right when it tends toward the integrity, stability, and beauty of a biotic system.” Do humans need to eat the herbivores that populate this ecosystem? No. But the ecosystem literality cannot survive without those free roaming herbivores. Because we have already altered the landscape by removing the large predators that kept it in balance – wolves, bears, lions, Indians – it is our ethical duty to restore the natural balance. Our response to this indisputable imperative has been to promote domestic herbivores on the Great Plains and harvest and utilize the protein that would have gone to the large predators. The ethics of this solution are problematic only because the factory-farming juggernaut tends to suck these domestic animals into its cruel, intensely stressful production chain of feedlots and slaughterhouses. My neighbors and I believe that the most ethical option is to keep our buffalo on the prairie for their entire lives and harvest them with respect, where they are secure and where there is little or no stress. The folks on the …

Nobody knows who first made this statement, but it’s been repeated thousands of times by people who have felt truth in it. I can be unsentimental about such touchy-feely things but I know exactly what this old adage is getting at. Who among us has not stood captivated at a pasture gate and watched a horse move on the other side of the fence? It comes upon me strongly at this time of year, when the horses come in from their winter pasture and stand close to the house like visiting gods with winter hair beginning to shed, and wild, winter-deep eyes staring back into mine. Today I laid hands on my young horse, Camo, for the first time since last November. He’s just four years old. If he were human he would be a teenager – the kind that stays up all night, drives cars too fast, and attracts us in spite of ourselves. He makes me corner him before he’ll let me slide a halter over his head. His eyes roll with uncertainty as I run my hands over his back, withers, rump, legs, and finally his neck and face. He’s put on a hundred pounds over the winter. He has scabs and is missing hair from where he battled his pasture mates. Over the winter he has fought his way to the top of the pecking order. After he had been tied to the corral fence for a half hour I picked up his feet and saddle him. The tension was draining out of him and soon he moved at the end of a lunge line just as he did last fall. I am at the center of his circles and feeling better than I have felt for weeks. That kind of proximity to a moving horse would make anyone feel good, and it makes me wonder why. The quote about the outside of a horse being good for the inside of a man has been attributed to ancient Greece, the British Empire – in the personage of Winston Churchill, and to the United States by Ronald Reagan, but any common man who had ever been around horses would likely understand the sentiment. For most of modern times, horses were common enough that any person could take a quiet moment to study them. Other animals were rarer and few people were in situations to know them, but all animals have the potential to calm us. For the last week we have been gathering buffalo from their huge winter pasture. This time of year we bring small bands of buffalo back to the west side of the Cheyenne River from miles away. Like the horses, they have been scattered all winter in very rough country where they have found good grazing in the hills and canyons along Big Corral Draw and Indian Creek. Some of them have not seen, or been seen, by a human for five months. This year, I have been helped by Colton Jones, my soon to be son-in-law. He’s a twenty-five-year-old college senior who works on the ranch whenever he has time. He is learning the lay of the land, how to get home from six miles out in the badlands, and how best to steer a group of twenty buffalo the entire distance. Colton and I found two dozen buffalo in almost the same place I had found a group the day before. Jill’s son, Lucas, drove us the twenty-five miles around to unload our ATV on the edge of the Badlands National Park, from where we could make a sweep back to …

The benefits of adding truly grassfed buffalo meat to our diets fall into three distinct categories: the health of our bodies, the health of our minds, and the health of our environment. The quick explanations of benefit in the first category are well known: relatively lower fat and cholesterol – increased omega 3 acids. The benefits to our minds have to do with a necessary human connection to wildness. The third category, environmental health, is the most difficult to qualify and quantify. The most complicated reason for supporting truly grassfed buffalo meat production and consumption falls in this last category. Try not to let your eyes glaze over but Carbon Sequestration, it may be the most important reason of all. I know that very few people care to understand organic chemistry. I don’t know much about it myself, except to realize that talking about carbon sequestration is a great way to ruin a first date or a cocktail party. The details of common chemical transformations of elements and compounds are more than most of us want to wrestle with, but the overarching concepts and processes are vital to our survival. That is why I’m going to try to put down on paper my understanding of why the production of truly grassfed buffalo meat could have a positive global effect. Let’s call it, Carbon Sequestration for Dummies. It is a very simplified version of the science – and probably not exactly accurate – but it might get you through that that first date or that cocktail party, as long as you don’t hang out with organic chemists. Start with the fact that living organisms are about 20% carbon. Once those organisms die, the carbon is retained in organic compounds that accumulate in the atmosphere, oceans, and soil until the compounds breakdown and the carbon is released. Excess, loose carbon is not a good thing to have flying around the atmosphere because it is a greenhouse gas that traps the sun’s energy and heats up the earth – Global Warming. Billions of tons of carbon are tied up – sequestered – in and on the earth in the form of plants and animals, living and long dead. Coal and oil are little more than huge underground carbon banks, deposited over many millions of years, in the form of ancient plants and animals. For the most part they are held safely in the earth’s “carbon bank” until we extract them and put them through chemical changes that turn them loose to become greenhouse gases.

…this essay was supposed to be about romance, love, and the unexplainable glue that sticks two people together. It didn’t end up being about Valentine’s Day but it has a lot to do with romance, love, and the unexplainable glue that sticks, not only two people to each other, but also the stuff that sticks some people to the land. Jill and I just got back from a few days in the borderlands – not only the country that runs along the border of Arizona and New Mexico but also the land that divides the United States from Mexico. We were guests of The Nature Conservancy and a dynamic collection of ranches controlling about a million acres of rough grazing land, wide valleys, and a couple mountain rages. The organization is called the Malpai Borderlands Group and their land is centered on the geographic borders between those states and countries. But, in a lot of ways the Malpai Borderlands Group occupies a border that is much more difficult to describe and more important than any physical geography. The Malpai Borderlands Group floats in the geography of the mind – somewhere between the past and the present – but not in the clichéd way you might think. It is not that the Malpai Borderlands Group is moving from the historic, open range days of the past into modern times. These people have been in modern times for many years. They are moving into the uncharted territory of the future. The big landscape country of the American West has been in turmoil since just after the Civil War. If God himself had put out a call for folks with poor qualifications for cooperation, a motlier crew would not have turned out. Armed and angry Civil War veterans from both sides, greedy industrialists, arrogant European aristocrats, land hungry peasants, disenfranchised Native Americans, the lunatic fringe of religion, misanthropes, and desperadoes of every sort poured into the unclaimed lands of the West. At first the only character trait that they shared was an abiding acquisitive nature: they all seemed to be out to get as much as they could. To make things even worse, many people coveted and seized concessions and property to which they had little or no solid claim. Of course local, state, and the federal governments had there own set of claims and they ended up in the mix as the entity that everyone could hate.

We buy their fine buffalo, we hire them, we are friends with them, and we are related to them. Though it is impossible to put yourself into the shoes of a minority group, we understand how hard and complicated Native Americans lives are and we know about the difficulties of working with them. It is indisputable that, on reservations, time moves at a different pace, promises are not always kept, and alcohol can be a devastating obstacle to conscientious work. The reasons for these problems are well known and not something that I want to rehash in this monthly musing. I will not argue that it is racism to point these shortcomings out when they apply to Native Americans. I want to argue that it is racism when we fail to level the same criticism at ourselves.

The chickadees came back today. With a pair of binoculars I was watching the buffalo that had just appeared at the river and something kept fluttering through my line of sight. It was a band of chickadees and I wondered if it could be the same band that had vacated our island of cottonwoods in September. Three weeks ago the white crowned sparrows showed up and a week before that I saw the first, winter goldfinch sitting at the bird feeder as if he’d never left. But the finches and the sparrows and the chickadees had left – at different times during the fall – and now they are back. It is good to see each species but the chickadee is special. For me, it is a Christmas bird that flits along the tree branches suddenly – just when you think that the windows are no longer portals to joy and surprise. They are tenacious little puffs of silver-grey that do not hesitate to grapple with those larger white crowns and goldfinches that have beat them back to the feeders overlooking the Cheyenne River.

… except to perhaps say that environmentalist applied enough pressure on President Obama to send the project back to the drawing board. A few folks might be able to add that the scheme is to extract oil from Canadian tar sands and ship it via pipeline to refineries in America’s lower tier of states. The pipeline is the dream of a company called TransCanada and the plan remains to pump hydrocarbons down the length of the American Great Plains – including our state of South Dakota – and eventually into the atmosphere. In the end it will produce more climate change in a place already known for difficult weather.  Of course what got the project sent back for review was that mining tar sands and piping all that oil, all that way, is inherently dangerous for all of us. Still, everyone thought it was a done deal – lots of construction jobs and a chance to lower US dependence on “foreign oil”.  Of course Canada too is a foreign country, but it’s … well, not AS foreign as SOME.

It has been a tough autumn. We’ve had some tragically bad luck around here: the inexplicable death of a three-year-old, pure-white gyrfalcon and an electrical fire that burned Jilian and Colton’s little house to the ground. I lost a beautiful bird that was an absolute joy to watch fly and Jilian and Colton lost everything, including their dogs. No one slept for weeks. It was all serendipitous and I feel petty for whining. But my plans of elegant outings in a Great Plains autumn were buried beneath communication with insurance companies, fire clean-up work, worries about getting a roof over the kid’s heads, and the general malaise of loss. All summer I’d been anticipating a North Dakota road trip with good friends and fine bird dogs in search of partridge and sharptailed grouse but those plans were dashed by the onslaught of life. Losing a Great Plains autumn is a great shame because one never knows how many Great Plains autumns are left, or what great adventures are missed. Consider that my friends flushed two moose and a mountain lion while following their dogs around North Dakota. They are energetic, fine fellows – capable of grand, urbane conversations over brown liquor, and lasting insights. I had been looking forward to that trip and now I have missed it.

By Dan O’Brien It is my favorite time of year. I would put a Great Plains’ autumn up against any other season, anywhere on Earth. Spring in Paris, summer in Tahiti, winter in the Alps – no comparison. Three nights ago the temperature made a surprising dip. The internet was predicting a cool evening but thirty-eight degrees is cool indeed for the first days of September. We have no air-conditioning at the ranch so Jill and I are used to sleeping with doors and windows wide open. There are only the screens between us and the summer nights, the pulsing of insects, the calling of moon birds, and the eerie awareness of night walkers. It is a grand way to sleep but on that first cold night we found ourselves groping in the dark for an extra blanket. We woke to a different world that most people would not have noticed. It was warming again by eight o’clock so it would have been easy to write off the magic night as an anomaly, a small divot in an otherwise seamless summer. But there was a subtle difference. The flies were suddenly slow enough to catch easily. The horses loped up to the coral instead of trotting. The sky seemed higher and a deeper shade of blue. The buffalo in the distance played in smaller groups ready for the wheat grass to turn ocher.     But the obvious difference, the thing that made me absolutely sure that I had not dreamed the shifting of celestial gears, were the bird dogs. With them, it must have something to do with the smell of things. I imagine the wafting of scents as colors, made more intense by the coolness, a yellow cloud moving from the sage brush, the mauve of the river, puffs of orange in the hoof prints of deer, and the filmy blue traces of grouse coming from the upper benches. To a bird dog those lacy, indigo tentacles meandering on the breeze is a calling every bit as strong as John Donne’s tolling bell. I don’t believe he, or Ernest Hemmingway for that matter, would mind my tweaking of their words to fit the landscape. No bird dog needs to ask for whom the bell of misty grouse breath tolls. It tolls for them, of course. And when I approached the kennels, no sleepy, stretching hounds emerge from the boxes. There was electricity in every dog. The youngsters were ecstatic; the old dog’s ears were miraculously keen again.

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.

…two weeks ago. For the last six years we have been harvesting buffalo about once a week in the pastures with the Sustainable Harvest Alliance crew and taking the hanging carcasses to an established processing plant in Rapid City. We have worked well with that plant but the Sustainable Harvest crew has been employed only part-time, somehow finding a way to take time off their day jobs to do a job that they believe is important. Those guys took great pride in the new plant because it was the next step in our drive to give the buffalo industry an alternative to the feedlot/cattle model of meat production. It made a lot more sense to put the Sustainable Harvest guys to work full-time in our own plant where we could have better control of the product from the pastures to your plates.

…but I am going to Las Vegas. One of my youngest brother’s sons is getting married in June and, odd as it seems to me, he is having a bachelor party in America’s city of fun and debauchery. One of the reasons for this choice of venue is, no doubt, the popularity of the movie, The Hangover. If you are looking for intellectual stimulation, I would not recommend it. But it really is damned funny and it has apparently inspired a generation of late-twenties, men to spend excessive amounts of money and make even greater fools of themselves by mimicking the movie’s heroes. The plot walks a group of young men through a one night bachelor party in Las Vegas which involves copious consumption of alcohol and drugs, hallucinations of casual sex, car chases, high stakes gambling, the marriage of one of the group to an exotic dancer, the loss of the bridegroom, a self inflicted tooth extraction, and the theft of Mike Tyson’s pet tiger. My suspicion is that this movie has set a standard of expectation that hundreds, if not thousands of bachelor parties are striving to equal or perhaps top.

… when we turn the buffalo out onto the National Grasslands, they disappear. When we push them across the Cheyenne River, the water is low and the buffalo are anxious to get across and spread out into the cedar lined canyons, the high grassy flats, and the maze of prairie dog towns that stretch for eight remote miles to the Badlands National Park. The older animals know exactly where they are going and the whole herd bucks and frolics with the buffalo-joy of moving. They splash across the foot-deep water and dissolve into the 22,000 acres of pasture like apparitions of two centuries past.

All over the west there is resistance to almost anything that is new. That reality extends to new people and especially to new people who raise buffalo. Even though we have been on this ranch for 8 yrs and have been ranchers for 36 years, our “new” neighbors are still standoffish and a little skeptical. That is why when one of those ranchers went out of his way to be neighborly, I took notice.

What has struck me hardest about the loss of my mother is how the future is suddenly frightening. It is not, as you might expect, a fear of death. It is a fear that there is no longer anyone to shelter me from the storms of life. It is a bit absurd for a 63 year old man to suddenly feel unprotected – it, after all, has been many, many years since my mother has taken an active roll in my affairs.

What is it about October that makes it so busy? Maybe we’re rushing to do all those things that we had planned over the summer but never found the time to do. Maybe it’s the cool breath of winter breathing on our face in the mornings, or the way the coffee steams as we stand barefoot on the deck beside the fire pit, still glowing dull red from the night before. Or course there are the dying leaves, and the migrating birds, and the deer and turkeys finishing off the last of the garden. All those things nourish melancholy like the knowledge that you are growing old.

By the date of this newsletter (I have a hard time keeping track myself), you can tell that writing is not something that I have had time for. My free moments are committed to running bird dogs, who along with me, anxiously await opening grouse season. So, this month I leave you with a quote from Jack London and an introduction to our new employee at Wild Idea.  Justin, we are glad to have you on board! “I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”       Jack London Meet Justin Fulton: Justin Fulton: Another family member has joined the Wild Idea team, nephew Justin. Justin spent his early childhood years in South Dakota, before his family moved to the greater Pheonix AZ area. With his father being a golf pro and his mother a restaurateur, Justin was always being exposed to good food. Escapes from city life started early on with the introduction to fishing and hunting. It didn’t take long for him to realize that he was hooked on nature. Justin has spent the last 10 years in business management. But ever since he has been an adult he has been trying to find a way to back to SD. With the new growth of Wild Idea, we started looking for someone who had a background in management, was passionate about the outdoors and had knowledge of meats. A tall order to fill, but then it hit us, we actually knew the perfect candidate.  Justin and his family (wife Kelly & sons Dylan & Daniel) made the move to join Wild Idea Buffalo Co.  Justin recently completed his HACCP (meat safety) certification. Although he will be working in all areas of the company, his focus will be in managing our new meat cutting plant and he will also be working closely with Sustainable Harvest Alliance. With his business management background, learned skills and greater environmental passions we are certain he will be an excellent asset to WIB. Justin is an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux tribe, and states “I’m very happy to be back home”.

In May I received a call from a land manager at the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanting to know if we would be interested in harvesting about one hundred free roaming buffalo. He’s stationed at Fort Thompson, SD, on the eastern bank of the Missouri River, where many of the Dakota people were settled after the famous Minnesota uprising of 1862. The name of the reservation is Crow Creek and, if you can look beyond the fact that the great Missouri River was drowned by the reservoir that was formed behind Big Bend Dam a hundred years after the Dakotas came to live there, you will find the landscape gorgeous. The bridge across the river actually runs along the top to the dam and Lake Sharp swells a mile wide and seventy miles above the dam to the north. Lake Francis Case stretches out below the dam for another seventy miles.

On the 16th of June, Jill and I were asked by Senator Johnson to travel to Washington DC to testify in front of a Senate hearing concerning the proposed Wilderness bill sponsored by Senator Johnson. The area in question is the view from our deck and while we are in favor of protecting that land by designation it as the first Grasslands Wilderness Area, there are many who are opposed: ranchers (who are distrustful of the federal government), ATV enthusiasts (who want the right to utilize the area), and proponents of a coal train expansion (because they know that raising the conversation value of that land will make it more difficult to run a coal train along side it). I believe the entire hearing is available on CSPAN.

In the last half of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth, it was all the rage for women to adorn their hats with the feathers of exotic birds. I’ve seen some of these lavishly decorated hats in museums and it is a little difficult to imagine that well-thought-of ladies of the time would have been caught dead in them. But fashion is a funny beast and the long, wispy egret, Ibis, heron, and spoonbill feathers really are one of nature’s wonders – though they look a lot better on the birds than they do on the dusty museum hats.

By happenstance, Jill and I got to spend about half of St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago. I was excited because, though my Irishness is mostly in name only, there was a time in college when I spent a few memorable St Patrick Days in the Windy City, with a friend by the name of Michael Maloney. Mike is a for-real, Chicago Irishman and on those trips I was exposed to the thoughtful, serious side of St. Patrick’s Day. Most memorable and foreign to me was the acappella singing of revolutionary songs, followed often by tears or just plain silence. On this trip, we were invited by the Chicago Zoological Society on the occasion of the opening of the Brookfield Zoo’s latest exhibit, The Great Bear Wilderness, and we took most of the daylight hours of the next day to walk the canyons of downtown Chicago and watch the revelers warming up.

The dead of winter is a time to be saved by books. I got three beauties for Christmas and it was just in the nick of time. November and December were cold and stark and I experienced a bit of a literary breakdown. I read a raft of contemporary poetry books and a young adult novel about a white magician in Queen Elizabeth’s court. For some reason, I read the kid’s book in the afternoons, in what is usually my reading time for serious books. In winter I have to fight with the cats for the sunny spot on the couch and this year, as I read about magicians and spells and curses, I was occasionally kneaded into reading aloud the parts about black, castle, cats that yowl and fly over the parapets like ravens.

Like a lot of other people, I have believed for my whole life that human beings can not expand their numbers and their rate of consumption indefinitely. While innovation might well change the dynamic slightly, I have always felt that some sort of catastrophe was likely. I am not one who thought it would come in a flash of Armageddon because, in the natural world, things usually move too slowly for an individual to actually bear witness to the change. Change is something that we usually have to take on faith or deduce from facts. I always figured that the catastrophe in the world’s future would come too slowly to get the attention of most people; that species and landscapes would disappear over generations or morph into ecosystems that we were genetically unprepared to thrive within. I thought the destruction of the habitat that humans need to thrive would occur so slowly that we would hardly notice until we had consumed our way far beyond the tipping point. I thought we might well act just like most of the other species that have gone extinct before us: take a few other species with us but pass into oblivion without leaving much more than a ripple in the ocean of geologic time. I really didn’t believe that humans would be in a position to even contemplate another destiny. But perhaps I was wrong.

If you live on the Great Plains and you believed as the pantheists believe; that the spirit that we call God is embodied in everything that we see and touch, you would celebrate Christmas differently. Out here the snow does not lay thick and fluffy on pine bows. The trees are mostly gnarled cottonwoods with only bare, black branches twisting up against an empty sky.  The snow is hard and icy and moves horizontally until it finds a calm spot behind a rock or in a draw where there is enough calm for it to settle and hunker down for the rest of the winter. It is rare to find enough snow, or children, in one place to make up a decent sledding party. I have never heard sleigh bells or dreamed the sound of reindeer hooves on our roof. The closest I can come to any of that is the stomping of horse hooves. They stand wooly and serious at the fence as they watch the peregrinations of snow-blanketed buffalo, moving above it all on the distant horizon.

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.

In September of 1988 a blast of cold rain sent a friend and me scurrying back to a shallow cave we had noticed in an African canyon wall. We had not seen anyone for days but now three young men with a kudu hung over a pole were scurrying from the other direction and we came suddenly face to face at the cave entrance. Their dogs raised their hackles and growled and we all stood frozen in the rain. I had not thought of the insurrections, murders, and mayhem that were going on throughout southern Africa for days, but now it was in all of our minds. Thankfully, it was cold and finally we all, white men, black men, dogs, and kudu pushed into the rock and out of the wet. No one spoke but after a few minutes I took a partial box of saltine crackers from my backpack and held a few out to the young men. We sat in the thick humidity with our backs against the rock and ate saltine crackers. It made me terribly sad for Africa.

For many of us, Michael Pollan was the first to articulate the concept that, when given a choice, buying your food from local producers is a healthier and more environmentally friendly way to shop. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma Pollan explored the pros and cons of buying and eating locally grown food. He discussed the overall costs, the transportation costs, quality issues, social value, and the enhanced healthfulness of locally purchased food. But what he talked mostly about was the restoration of trust between the consumers of food and the purchasers of food. My reading of Pollan’s book, and other like authors was that buying and eating locally is first and foremost a way to counter the lack of trust created by the faceless agribusiness and shady advertisers who have led us to our current food crisis. Before we abdicated the procurement of our food to corporations, everyone knew where their food was coming from, who raised the food, and the way the food was being produced. The system was structured so that these things could not be kept secret.  Personal relationships between consumer and producer created a quality of trust that can not be approached by modern-day agribusiness. Of course, like the concepts of organic, free range, and cage free, it has taken only a few years for the idea of eating locally to be dumbed down, cooped, and elevated to an unrealistic messiah status. If only the answer to our food problem, with its associated environmental, health, and social problems were as easy as simply eating locally! Sadly, it is not. For instance, one of the great claims of the eating local disciples is that transportation costs in terms of greenhouse gasses will be phenomenally reduced. It could be so, but the carbon foot print of food is a very complicated calculation and the ecological damage that can be done is equally complicated. Driving an imported car to the farmer’s market for a couple heads of lettuce can easily negate the potential gains. And, if that lettuce is grown with irrigation water channeled from distant mountains, or deep wells drilled into mysterious aquifers, the entire equation explodes; not to mention the environmental consequences of eco-systems and species that suffer due to creating this unsustainable Garden of Eden. Cutting down the number of miles that food travels is a good idea of course, but very few people in America live in a place where enough healthy, diverse food is available all year long. No large population centers could survive on what is grown just in the surrounding countryside. For most of America, growing seasons are far too short to keep us healthy without a major population correction or an unacceptable life style alteration. The Midwest would have to get used to eating mostly meat. We would have to forget about coffee, tea, almost all fish, and anything green in winter. Even California, with its immense population and borrowed water supply, would be hard-pressed to feed its people locally. Forget about the economic, social, psychological, and environmental value of some foods that exist only beyond the imaginary line that demarcates “local”. All of us who have trouble breaking through the surface tension of this complicated question should go back to Michael Pollan’s book. He dives deep and understands that there is nothing simple about any of this. In the chapter on grass-fed he says clearly that the eat-local movement was never meant to exclude trade in foods that cannot be produced locally. In many ways “eat locally” has become just another marketing slogan, a balm for the troubled psyches of all …

Somehow, the hours in our week are increasingly filled with answering emails and listening in on conference calls with government bureaucrats, hardnosed business types, media people, scientists, and other folks who have become pretty cynical about the world and how it works. I’ve been thinking that all those seemingly pointless emails and conversations might well be a sign of my own cynicism. Where did I get the idea that the attention of those world-weary warriors are the avenue to effecting critical change in attitudes toward the environment, agriculture, food, and human and animal welfare? After all, the people who suck up my time and keep me away from my writing desk are, for the most part, the same cast of characters who have failed, for years, to correct those same faulty and fatal attitudes.

As I listened to all the commentary concerning the Mexican Swine Flu, one thing continued to jump out at me. In the reports describing hundreds of thousands of people in Mexico City wearing face masks, the huge Smithfield Farms swine confinement facility where the flu was likely incubated, or Joe Biden expressing concern about his family traveling in a commercial airplane, there was a hidden but common thread. The new stain of flu was, of course, painted as an imminent danger. But no one seemed to identify the overcrowding of people or pigs as the overarching problem behind the headlines.

Early Sunday morning I talked on the telephone to a friend whose family owns a house along the Red River. The house is on the Minnesota side but now the river is all around them. Forty two feet above flood stage is a lot of water. After I talked to him I got the topography maps out and sat by the window that overlooks the Cheyenne River a half mile to the east. I figured that if the Cheyenne ever got forty-two feet above its banks it would be lapping at the horse pasture gate. Our house would still be high and dry but the sight would be frightening – lots of drowned trees and ruined fences. The corral would be gone and some prairie dogs would likely be dead. But there would be no great losses like there is when a river floods a populated area like Fargo-Morehead. Noting like New Orleans.

The news of the world is so bad that Jill and I have pretty much stopped listening to NPR in the mornings. Sometime in the last several years we got into the habit of turning on the radio every morning around 4 am and waking up slowly to descriptions of whatever happened to the world in the previous twenty-four hours. Waking up like that was often the highlight of the day. We came to life considering interesting thoughts and hearing vivid word portraits of astounding events. We drifted in and out of consciousness while the coffee perked in the kitchen and the bird songs outside the window built to a six-thirty crescendo. You could feel the rest of world warming in the new light.

Dan working with the dogs at the Weaver Ranch, this is how the grasslands should look. When I was a kid in the fifties and sixties I lived in what was just beginning to be called The Rust Belt. I was born and raised in northwestern Ohio among dirty and failing manufacturing plants; heavy industry, piece-work factories, tire and appliance builders. I was just a child and not until later did I realize that the stench of the rubber plants was not natural and probably damaging our health. I felt – but didn’t understand – that the land had been severely abused. The fact that the beaches of Lake Erie were posted with skull and crossed bone signs raised a few of our parent’s eyebrows but was mostly met with shrugs of resignation. My dad was disheartened when he showed me a slough along a Lake Erie estuary where he had hunted ducks and geese as young man. The slough was eerie indeed: silent, still, polluted, and dead. I remember him shaking his head at the news that the world renown peach and walleye fishery was closed because the fish were found to be poisonous. When, in 1969, the Cuyahoga River actually caught on fire and burned, most of us laughed that sad laugh people resort to when they are sick and afraid inside. But my father was angry. “What in the hell,” he asked, “are we doing?”

Ecosystems are morphing beasts with fuzzy edges. It’s hard to say where one leaves off and the next one begins – hard to say exactly what influence a mangrove swamp has on, say, the sand dunes behind them. But to make a meaningful stab at conserving that swamp we have to draw a line somewhere and the more delicate the ecosystem is, and the more attractive in terms of potential human use, the more important it is to get that line drawn quickly. Given the state of environmental degradation in the world, when it comes to drawing lines, speed might be more important than accuracy.

Turkey bones simmer in the old steel soup pot. The cat curls in his basket. Early-winter sunshine warms my chair as I read the poems of old friends Harrison and Koosher. My eyes drift between the bird feeder and the page. The summer birds are gone but I saw two juncos and a pine siskin only an hour ago. The gold finches have faded to a kaki green. Soon the chickadees and nuthatches will appear from nowhere.

It is early in the morning of November 5, 2008. Yesterday at this time I was driving to my polling place to vote in what the entire world has called an historic election. The trip took me about an hour each way and cost me about fifteen bucks. Most of the road is gravel and I had to be careful not to hit a deer because the nights have begun to freeze, the pastures have turned brown, and the only green grass is in the road ditches where moisture has collected over the summer. The deer pile into those ditches this time of year, trying their best to lay on an extra layer of fat before the really cold days begin.

Watching the recent events on Wall Street and in Washington DC has me thinking about the relationship between profit, sustainability, and greed. Iíll leave my thoughts about greed until later and Iíll resist my knee-jerk reaction to the relationship between profit and sustainability. Maybe profit and sustainability are not mutually exclusive. Let me try a metaphor: Profit and sustainability are like water and land, they are more similar that different.

I picked up a semi-truck in Louisville, Kentucky on a Tuesday night and had it back in the center of South Dakota before sunset the next day. I wasn’t thinking much about the Great Plains as I waited for the truck salesman to pick me up at the Louisville airport, as we rechecked the paper work, or as he gave me the five minute check-out ride before sending me down the road. The Great Plains never entered my mind until I crossed over into Indiana and my front wheels touched the bridge over the Ohio River. The Ohio River conjures up lots of images in lots of other people’s minds but, in my mind it’s mostly about a group of forty-three strong, free, young men paddling two canoes and pulling a heavily loaded keel boat. Every time I see the Ohio River I think of Lewis, Clark, and the Corps of Discovery.

Last week I sat-in on a discussion about carbon sequestration. You’ve heard about carbon sequestration. It’s a hot topic now that the world has finally agreed that humans are contributing, big time, to climate change. The term is often found in concert with the concept of striving for carbon neutrality. You know, like Al Gore buys carbon off-sets from an exchange in Chicago so he can still fly around in a jet and remain Carbon Neutral – in other words – doing his part to keep the planet from warming up. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you are not alone.

The organizers of a book signing in Aix en-Provence invited Jill and me to a party in a lovely apartment in the center of town. There were mounds of pasta, wonderful greens, and lots of wine. Many of the other guests were food people and there were a few farmers in the mix. By then, we had been in France for nearly a month and that afternoon, at the book signing, I had talked a little bit about the excellence of the food we had found – especially in the countryside. I spoke with admiration about the cheeses and sausages we found in the country kitchens of our friends. The cuts of meat purchased from a one-man butcher shop in Normandy. What we had found was that there was an enormous sense of pride in the producers and that this “hand-made” dimension was easy to recognize in the taste of the food. As I glanced around the party at the hale, hardy, and lean Frenchmen engaged in strenuous debate, the health benefits of such a food system seemed obvious too.

There are a million things to blame this situation on: credit, globalization, materialism, market concentration rampant conservatives, silly liberalism, and I don’t pretend to be smart enough to back track this monster to its lair. I prefer to identify the doorstep where the blame does NOT belong. That doorstep is OURS.

(Part of a key-note speech given at Lane Community College in the first week of May. Lane is experiencing drastic budget cuts. Programs are going away and people are losing their jobs.) We have all heard the saying that the only two things you can count on are death and taxes. To that short list I think we can safely add the maxims, boys and girls will get together and change is inevitable. The ancient philosopher Heraclitus is credited with saying it first: There is nothing permanent except change. Let me say it again, Change is inevitable. Living creatures are certainly no strangers to change – in fact, we are products of change. We have come a long way from that one celled microbe that crawled from the primordial ooze. We are what we are because of our reaction to change. Change is synonymous to life. But SLOW change. Nothing in our genetic make-up has prepared us for the speed of change that we are now forced to accommodate. In many ways it is our struggle to deal with the speed of our changing life roles that is stealing our livelihoods, our communities, our sanity. It can be devastating. But it can also be a new beginning.

Three years ago a group of Lakota people came to Wild Idea and asked if we could come out to the reservation and harvest their buffalo the same way we harvest our own. These were our neighbors. They had looked at our website and many had heard me raving about Great Plains restoration, respect for buffalo, and the production of America’s finest red meat. They said Wild Idea’s attitude toward such things was very much like their attitudes. Even though those attitudes might have originated in slightly different cultural values, I was honored.

Here is chapter four of the ongoing children’s story. Check achieves for the first three chapters. Keep letting me know what you think about the story. THE HOMESTEAD IN THE SHADOW OF STRONGHOLD CHAPTER FOUR It was decided that Pappa Robert would go to Deadwood after he and Jack had cut enough wood for the winter. It was already September and the nights were cooling. Mama, Molly, and Grandmother Iron Cloud dug a third of the potatoes and left the other two thirds in the ground where Mama said they would keep. In the cotton woods along the river Pappa Robert and Jack cut wood into lengths just long enough to fit into the stove and stacked it on the rickety wagon. They kept a shotgun leaned against a stump and three times shot migrating mallard ducks for Mama to cook and steam into jars for the winter.

Note: Here is chapter three of a rough draft of my first children’s story. Check the achieves for the first two chapters. It looks like Homestead In The Shadow of Stronghold is going to be about seven chapters. So we’re almost half way through. Sorry about the inconsistencies and the spelling errors. I’ll get that on the next pass. I’ve had lots of comments and sage advice. Keep them coming. For a look at Installments One and Two, go to archives, January and February 2007. HOMESTEAD IN THE SHADOW OF STRONGHOLD TABLE Installment Three Molly and Jack sat across the fire from Grandmother Iron Cloud. They crossed their legs and looked into the embers as the old woman stirred them gently and laid the stick on top. The dry cottonwood burst into a tiny flame that lit the live trees that surrounded them. “The animals know your heart,” she said without looking up. “They are better at such things than men.”

Thanks to all who tossed in their advice on the first chapter of the first draft of my first “kid’s story”. Keep the advice coming! For a look at Installment One, go to archives, January 2007. THE HOMESTEAD IN THE SHADOW OF STRONGHOLD Installment Two There was no rain that spring. The wheat had been planted in the fall and had begun to grow. But by May, when it should have been six inches high and as green as the way Pappa Robert remembered Ireland, it was short and yellow. Unless it rained there would be no crop to sell and so no money to buy the things they could not grow, hunt or make for themselves. There would be no new shoes, no cloth for trousers and dresses and shirts, no salt, no sugar. But, if Jack had anything to say about it, there would be enough meat to keep them healthy. The hunting was difficult, even the rabbits were hard to find, and Jack was forced to range out further and further. Sometimes, if Shamrock, their only horse, was not needed by Pappa Robert, Jack would ride out in search of antelope. They lived on the great flats above the river bottom and they were very wary. Jack learned early on that they could see a rider or a hunter on foot a mile away. Time and time again he would creep for an hour on hands and knees. He would keep the smallest knoll between himself and the antelope but always, as he rose up to take his shot he would find that the antelope were gone. When he told Molly about how the antelope seemed to know he was there, even when he was sure they could not see or smell him Grandmother Iron Cloud moved closer to listen. Her eyes narrowed as he told about the herd he had spotted two miles away. How he had ridden down-wind of them and tied Shamrock to a sagebrush. There was a small, rocky butte in the middle of the prairie and he had used it conceal his movement. He was sure that the antelope had not seen him but, as always, when he slowly raised one eye above the rocks of the little butte the antelope had moved. They were well out of range of his rifle. Molly was fascinated by the story but Grandmother Iron Cloud only shook her head. The Andersons left the valley in June. They had relatives in Oregon where it rained all the time and Mr. Anderson spit in the dust when they stopped by with the wagon piled high to say good by. “I can leave you with that much moisture,” he said. All the adults laughed but the laughs were not because what was said was funny. The two families looked at each other; Mr. Anderson on the ground looked level into the eyes of Pappa Robert and his wife and little girl, Jennifer, on the wagon seat looking across to Jack and Molly. Before Mr. Anderson again spoke he looked around the homestead. He saw the withering wheat filed and the failing garden, the small house built with a few timbers and sod. He looked to Grandmother Iron Cloud’s dugout and found her standing silently by the door. “You should get out too,” Mr. Anderson said to Pappa Robert. Pappa Robert smiled without showing his teeth but he said nothing. Then Mamma stepped up to the wagon and put her hand out to Mrs. Anderson. “We wish you luck,” she said. “We hope Oregon is good for you.” Mrs. …

I have been challenged by a Wild Idea customer to “write a children’s story with buffalo, why don’t you?” Well, I’ve never done that but I’ve always wanted to try. It might take me a few months but here is the first part of a first draft of a first children’s story.” I am looking for advice. THE HOMESTEAD IN THE SHADOW OF STRONGHOLD Installment One The winter after Grandmother Iron Cloud died was the worst that anyone could remember. The homesteaders of the Cheyenne River Bottom had only been around for a few years but the Lakota people agreed that there had never been so much snow, that the winds had never blown so hard, and that it had never been so cold. But Grandmother Iron loud died in the autumn, when the leaves of the cottonwood trees along the Cheyenne River fluttered the brightest yellow that Jack and Molly Ryan had ever seen.

It doesn’t look much like Christmas here on the Cheyenne River but you can feel it gathering beyond the northern horizon. The landscape is brown and cold. Below zero this morning, but sunny. It is a good morning to sit at the word processor and stare out the French doors at the river a mile down-country. The buffalo are across the river in the roadless area. I know right where they are: at the head of Little Corral Draw, where the drainage makes a wide swing to the North. In that country the land breaks up into huge pedestals with eroded edges. Cattle have a lot of trouble climbing those fortresses and as a result there are places where the grass has not been touched since the buffalo were extirpated, a hundred and forty years ago. The buffalo are up in that rough country, grazing the tops, lounging under the lips of ridges – in the bright sunlight and out of the wind. They have been up there for a week, still putting on autumn fat, observing their version of Thanksgiving and waiting for Christmas.

I began writing this monthly musing about Sir Nicholas Stern’s report on the economic impact of global warming but I couldn’t do it. The subject, and the report, is just too hard. I couldn’t read the entire report because it is 700 pages long and because what I did read was as cold and inhuman as, well, an economic report. I ended up Googling (or should I say that I got on The Google and found) “Sir Nicolas Stern on global warming”. After reading this Cliff notes version, the Earth shaking economic report on the cost of global warming came a lot more clear to this none-economic -type. Stern is not a crack-pot, sentimental environmentalist. He is a past chief economist for the World Bank. That is why a lot off cornucopians are taking what he said seriously and probably why his report was un-readable for me. The Google search did a much better job of making Stern’s report real to me than almost anything I could have tried.

Perhaps my best argument against the theory of Intelligent Design is the indisputable fact that the vast majority of the good things to do in life happen in the same month. I’m talking about October and more specifically, October on the Great Plains. Winter out here can be inhuman, the last few summers have been unbearable. Spring can be good, but unpredictable. The time of year we wait for is fall. And the fall month of choice is October.

I’ve been feeling mortal. I suppose it started when I came down with pneumonia and the doctor looked at my chart and said, “In light of your age, we’d better order some additional tests.” He was about thirty and had that wrinkle and flake-free tan that doctors get from being able to choose the sort of sun they stand in. I don’t begrudge those tans. I’m just jealous and feeling mortal.

In the mid-ninetieth century the word spread around the world that the United States of American was about to begin a project that would alter the future of that new country, North America, and the world beyond. It would be an unparalleled engineering feat that would bring transfiguring prosperity to the Great Plains and to the country as a whole. The plan was to build a transcontinental railroad and the railroad’s promoters heralded it as the agent that could bring settlement to the West, much needed raw products to the Coasts, and wealth to all Americans.

The first thing I saw when I pulled into Tuttle, North Dakota was a corner gas station that looked like it could have been the model for a Norman Rockwell painting. Everything was the way it might have been in 1958: the red and white frame building, the single mechanic’s bay, the “bubble gum machine” gas pump, the public bench out front. The elements missing from that idyllic version of American’s past were the things that made Rockwell, and perhaps America herself, famous throughout the world. When I drove slowly past Tuttle, North Dakota’s only gas station I found no sense of pride, no impression of enterprise, and no hope of prosperity.

As one travels the center of our country the effort to conserve and restore the diversity and natural systems of the American Great Plains is evident. Conservation groups, government agencies, and individuals are hard at work on a thousand projects; from habitat restoration, to reintroduction of endangered species, to water shed protection, to base-line science that will help us understand what needs to be done. I see these efforts everywhere I go and I marvel at the array of fronts on which lovers of the “Big Open” are working.

Is it our twentieth century lives or is it human nature that makes us pile too much on our plates? Or maybe it is me? All my life I have felt like I’m running about a week behind. Sometimes, like this spring, I fall many weeks behind and the weight of it slows me to the point that the eternal funk that has been chasing me since childhood threatens to catches up. I fantasize that it has something to do with being a Midwesterner, with my desire to please, and with my inability to say no. Maybe it is the plight of the free-lancer, i.e. knowing that next month might bring no offers of gainful employment we cannot afford to say no to any job proposal. Then, occasionally, all the proposals come through and there you are – plate again filled to overflowing.

I was asked to speak to a local church on Easter Sunday concerning the joys of living on the Great Plains. There are a couple problems with this request: first, I have never been a big celebrator of Easter and second, putting one’s finger on the joys of living on the Great Plains is a difficult job. I can deal with the first problem by looking back about fifty years to the time when I did celebrate Easter, forgetting some of what I have learned about other religions and ideas over those years, and recalling that one interpretation of Easter is a day of renewal, optimism, and belief in a fresh start. Who among us does not want to believe we have a chance at getting life right?

A few weeks ago, on a warm winter evening along the North Platte River, I meet a small, gentle man by the name of Gilford Rauch. His day job is a mid-level executive for one of the big insurance companies in Omaha. I don’t know exactly what that means but by the looks of Gilford I figured he might be an actuary or, at least, someone who spends most of his days in a windowless room with long columns of numbers as his main stimulation. He is a bandy-legged man of perhaps sixty years but with a nearly perpetual contented grin under his substantial bifocals. As we shook hands I felt a delicate but wiry hand take hold with a strength and solidness that surprised me.

A few weeks ago, on a warm winter evening along the North Platte River, I meet a small, gentle man by the name of Gilford Rauch. His day job is a mid-level executive for one of the big insurance companies in Omaha. I don’t know exactly what that means but by the looks of Gilford I figured he might be an actuary or, at least, someone who spends most of his days in a windowless room with long columns of numbers as his main stimulation. He is a bandy-legged man of perhaps sixty years but with a nearly perpetual contented grin under his substantial bifocals. As we shook hands I felt a delicate but wiry hand take hold with a strength and solidness that surprised me.

A fifty-degree, windless day in January is something to savor on the Northern Great Plains. So yesterday we saddled up the horses and rode off for the far side of the river – onto the immense expanse of “empty” land that is being pushed hard to be made an official Wilderness Area.

Not long ago I had the pleasure of driving down the length of the Great Plains from my home in the Dakotas to South Texas. I passed through nearly all of five large states and as I drove I watched the land change. To the careful observer there is a world of difference in topography, flora, and fauna between the Missouri River breaks of South Dakota and the Cap Rock of Texas. Even the people change: from the stern northern European Lutherans of the Northern Plains to the slow talking Baptists and Hispanics of the Llano Estacada. But the similarities are overwhelming. Blue stem, grama, wheat-grass is everywhere. The pickup is seldom out of the gaze of pronghorn antelope and mule deer. Migrating hawks and waterfowl shadow your progress north in the spring and south in the autumn.

We live in a land of accidental monuments. Mostly they were erected in the beginning of the last century and were not intended to mark the passage of great events. They were intended to be the beginnings of something. They dot the landscape in the form of leaning or tumbled down buildings surrounded by tree groves dying of thirst. Sometimes there are moldering corrals of rotten boards brought in by trains that no longer run. Sometimes the county road that once led to them is still passable. Sometimes those roads have been over taken by what was pushed aside to construct them. Often there is only a depression that marks the root cellar where precious vegetables were stored for the few years that the dream survived.

It’s five o’clock in the morning of the most important day of the year. Upstairs the coffee is perking and already I’ve stepped outside three times – just to bear witness, to feel what is taking place, to be touched in the same way as every other object and organism on this ranch. Last night the temperature slid below the magic bearer of freezing. The first frost. There is no adept metaphor. When I first stepped outside this morning the world was irredeemably different than it was when I went to bed.

An excerpt form the first full draft of his new novel, “Stolen Horses”. The sun was touching the horizon as Leo and Carl topped the ridge on the way back to the house. Purples and reds shot over their heads and fanned out toward the east. The air was dead calm and the world was as quiet as it can be. Carl was thinking back on the afternoon, engrossed in the detail of memory, when a trio of grouse winged overhead. He wouldn’t have known the grouse were anywhere near if Leo wouldn’t have heard them and looked up. When Carl followed his dog’s stare he saw the birds flying high above just as the intermittent chuckles and the whir of their wings reached his ears. They cut the watercolor sky like tiny turbo-powered footballs and it was clear that they had a destination in mind. Leo perked his ear and twisted his head, first at them, then at Carl. He wanted Carl to shoot but Carl had no intention of shooting. Their day was done and instead of focusing his attention for a shot Carl let his mind wonder at where the grouse might be going.

One of the first buffalo that came to this ranch was a scrawny orphan with a crooked horn. He couldn’t have weighed over forty pounds and no one was betting that he would even survive, let alone thrive. The twisted horn is what gave him his name, Curly Bill, and it wasn’t long into that first tough winter that the little urchin began to win our heats. He was a bit of an ugly duckling and several buffalo managers more knowledgeable than I took one look at him and advised me not to make him herd bull. They said this with a chuckle and meant that Curly Bill should not be allowed to breed. They judged his genes detrimental to my buffalo herd and urged me buy some “quality bulls” to improve my herd.

I have never been to the Mission San Juan Capistrano but my mother told me about the swallows. What I remember from her stories is what many of us remember from the legend of The Swallows of Capistrano: There is an old Catholic mission somewhere in far off California where swallows return each year to mark the coming of spring. They leave in the autumn and the evens of the mission buildings are silent and bare all winter. We lived in Ohio where the winters can be silent and bare and my mother would mold that story of the swallow’s returning into a lesson of faith. Not necessarily faith in God (though she was not above slipping in such sectarian messages) but more faith in the rhythm and balance of life – faith in the dependability of the natural world. She assured my brothers and me that faith in the coming of spring was powerful enough to make it happen and even in the grip of a cold, icy Ohio winter belief in The Swallows of Capistrano was sometimes the best tool for getting through until summer.

The day Jill was due to arrive home from France I got a call that an old friend had just died. Tim Hjort and his family had become my friends through Jill. She and Jilian had lived beside them years ago and something had clicked the way it sometimes does. When I met the Hjort’s it clicked for me too. Tim was just my age, a progressive man who had been raised on a Montana ranch and had ranched in South Dakota for decades. He could be as cynical and cantankerous as I can be. We enjoyed each other’s company and our families enjoyed each other, so greeting Jill with the news of Tim’s impending funeral was tough duty.

Last month I thought our winter had finally arrived. I thought so because we had both snow and cold. Well, I was wrong. Neither the snow nor the cold lasted, and now the robins have returned to the ranch. I mention the robins because they seem to be early, and I haven’t yet seen a white-crowned sparrow (which doesn’t mean they are not here), a more dependable harbinger of an early spring arrival.

Now we move into Spring. Both the Ides of March and the Vernal Equinox have passed. Dawn comes a little earlier each morning; the sun eases itself little by little northward in the eastern sunrise sky. The prairie winds blow and whistle and sometimes howl. But if you are going to live in the prairie, you will live with the winds.

The holiday season has come and gone and I can safely say that winter, in its full attire, has arrived. Let me get you caught up on what’s been happening out here.

On this quiet, chilly, but snowless afternoon I started thinking about a part of this ranch’s life that I don’t often write about. Houseguests. We have frequently had houseguests here, and they have done a little bit of almost everything there is to do at the ranch. Our houseguests generally have been: family, friends, business acquaintances (including writers, musicians, photographers, environmentalists, botanists, customer/clients, occasional vacationers, and a hunter or two). Some visitors have just come by, out of interest and curiosity, to see the buffalo, the ranch, and what we do. We try, as much as we can, to show them as much of the ranch workings as they have wanted to see. And we can almost always provide a beer or a glass of wine, a cup of coffee or a bottle of water to accompany a tour.