Category Archive

Last month I wrote about the basic structure and vision of what we call the Cheyenne River Ranch, which had its true origins within the confines of the Broken Heart Ranch. This month I would like you to know something about the expansion of the vision and practices of these ranches into the creation of the Sustainable Harvest Alliance: for harvesting buffalo in native pastures.

…why I consider that this Cheyenne River Ranch and formerly the Broken Heart Ranch are different from other ranches beyond the fact of being buffalo ranches. In the past and in attempting to answer that question with at least a modicum of intelligence, I mentioned the fences, the restoration or conversion of agricultural land to native grass prairie, the difficulties and joys of enhancing habitat for the benefit of native species, and the ways we try to leave a minimal footprint on the land. But that never quite got to the heart of the issue and remained somewhat general and non-specific. In an attempt to remedy that situation I am going to try to offer you a kind of rough blueprint of what I perceive to be the goals of the Wild Idea Buffalo dream, an interconnected and diverse group of elements that both construct and reveal the success of that construction.

By Gervase Hittle A few days ago I happened to be in Rapid City doing some errands and grocery shopping. My freezer no longer had any buffalo meat; so I went to the new office/cut and pack meat plant of Wild Idea Buffalo Company. I had been there before, both during its construction and after it had opened for business, and the crew was just beginning to work out the production kinks of the new operation.

At the beginning of the third week of June I met with a group and conducted a tour of the Cheyenne River Ranch. This tour was by no means the first of these with which I have been involved, but this one ranks right up there with the best. If my memory serves me correctly, there were twenty-four rising high school seniors and six adult sponsors from Westminster Christian Academy in St. Louis, Missouri. The group was/is led by Warren Smith and five others: Ann Heyse, Kelsey Walton, Anne Westhoff, Chris Knerr, and Dan Burke. The reason for the tour was to be one of the events on the students’ Summer Seminar Program. They will be H.S. Seniors in the Fall of 2011. As members of the seminar, they have spent some time in South Dakota, read BUFFALO FOR THE BROKEN HEART, and other works. They did some backpacking in the Badlands National Park, some bicycling in the Black Hills, and hopefully got to do some kayaking in either the White or the Cheyenne River.

I don’t know exactly what to write today, because I am leaving my position at the ranch. It is not without some regret that I do so, but several things have converged so the timing is most appropriate. The convergence includes my age, an upcoming surgical procedure on May 3rd that will require a month to a month and a half for recovery, and I am now involved with a very wonderful woman who lives in Hill City.

I am and have been a proponent of U.S. Senator Tim Johnson’s “Buffalo Gap National Grasslands Wilderness” proposal. That is not an astute political position to take in this neighborhood and political climate—-but it is the right one. Recently the Rapid City Journal ran a front page story on this issue and published two lists: a) of supporters and b) of opponents to this proposal.

I may be wrong here, but real winter seems to have come late this year. Autumn ran late and mid-winter seemed extraordinarily warm. The first real cold period came in late January and mid-February, and the first major snow fell after the middle of February, and we have now had three consecutive, relatively substantial snowfalls. Typically March is our snowiest month. That is yet to be seen. I am not complaining, and I realize that much of this nation has been subjected to some other than ordinary winter occurrences.

Many of my closest friends consider me as “old school.” I consider myself “old school;” so I don’t take that designation to be negative. I use a computer and carry a cell phone and am fairly comfortable and capable with both, but they are tools, not portable entertainment centers for me. I use them when I need them, and they “sleep” at all other times. When I think about defining “old school,” I think about authorship as ownership, about accepting responsibility for my actions (both good and bad), about my rifles with their beautifully grained wooden stocks, their blue, steel finish, and their micrometer adjustable, iron sights (even though my eyes now demand scopes); I also think about the dwindling family farms and ranches, about the now obsolete, corner gas station with its full service care, about my old saddles, the unfenced places I have ridden, and about windmills, not the windmills at which Don Quixote tilts, but those any traveler today can see dotted across the rural parts of this country in which we live.

January 3rd of 2011 was the ninth anniversary of coming to live and work on the Cheyenne River Ranch. Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe that I have been here that long. I remember my first day of work: after I had moved into what was then my living space the call went out that someone had left a gate open and naturally the buffalo herd had wandered through it and were perhaps two miles away. We tracked them in almost a foot of snow. I think there were six or eight of us in trucks and on ATV’s. We easily brought them back into our pastures because bison seem to like to go back to where they came from. Erney calls them “the going’st back animals in the world.” He might be right.

I am constantly amazed at the value we assign to things, events, people, and possessions. We mostly view “value” in financial terms, amortization tables, and dollars and cents. This view keeps everything neat and sterile and allows us to dodge the real value of whatever it is we are evaluating. Perhaps the price that we pay for something, whether it be for a dozen eggs, a paved road, newly let stocks in GM, a work of art, or a vacation ski trip to Chamonix, establishes the value of that acquisition, but I don’t believe so.

I am not necessarily convinced that “good fences make good neighbors” as suggested by the narrator’s neighbor in Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall.” That all depends on the will of those who share the fence, and of those who built it, and for what purpose. Here in South Dakota the general rule in rural life holds that those who share a fence share its repair responsibilities and maintenance costs. The ordinary way to do this has the neighbors start in the middle of the shared fence from their own side and work to their right. Any major inequities, such as water crossings, that are only on one side of the fence’s middle, can and should also be shared, in such a manner as the neighbors deem fair.

Cool evenings, chilly mornings, and Indian Summer days make a good combination for work, leisure, play, and sleep. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But the world doesn’t just roll on endlessly, it carries, drags or pushes us with it.

At the moment of this writing, I am in southwestern Oklahoma visiting my family and taking care of some minimal business here in the town where I grew up, graduated from High School, and departed for other, not necessarily greener, pastures. Coming back here is always a long road, mostly because I no longer consider this place as home. Home is where I feel most comfortable, not in the sense of sitting in a beloved, overstuffed chair or sleeping in a cushy bed, but rather in the sense of being at ease in my environment. Environment refers not only to the immediate physical surroundings of where I live in the northern plains but also to the intellectual camaraderie of my friends, to their social and political ideals, and to the emotional sense I feel when I meet the new day that presents itself to me and which, like it or not, I must meet. I attained my majority in the southern plains in the vast prairie west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains. I have lived the largest part of my life in the northern plains, and I have felt the tightening grip that the northern plains have exerted on my life. But it was in the southern plains that I first met the American Bison and elk, and where I learned to ride a horse. Every time I return to this area, I make a point of visiting the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge where I hiked and camped as I was growing up. Not very much has changed in the Refuge since then, except the regulations regarding camping and swimming. I understand those changes because the area gets so much use from visitors that without regulations it would likely be damaged beyond recovery. The Wichita Mountain Range consists of about a sixty mile outcropping of red granite that pushed up through the surrounding layers of limestone, sandstone, slate and shale, much like the Black Hills of South Dakota, except the Wichitas are much, much older and are, therefore, more rounded and worn, more exfoliated, then the jagged peaks of the Black Hills. The Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache fought here to retain their heritage just as did the Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes in the northern plains. The subsequent history concerning the establishment of reservations for the tribes is also similar north and south, as was the resistance by the tribes against those reservations and the loss of their heritage. And just as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were the last to “come in” so, too, were Quanah Parker and Geronimo the last war chiefs to realize that the fight was lost and conceding was the only, however meager, road to survival. Geronimo is buried with many family and tribal members in the Apache Cemetery at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Quanah Parker and members of his family are interred in the Old Post Cemetery at Fort Sill. Both grave sites are reverenced by tribal descendants who grace the surrounding trees with mementos and traditional prayer bundles. I visit the grave sites occasionally and try to imagine what it must have been like with the buffalo gone, the heritage overwhelmed, the home, as it had been known, no longer comfortable, no longer an environment in which to be at ease.

One of the most fascinating things I have found while working on this buffalo ranch is serenity. It does not come around like a pet dog and more likely remains obscure if actively sought. Serenity comes in stillness between the grunt of a cow for her calf and the movement of that calf toward its mother. It comes when my horse steps into the Cheyenne River and picks his way across the submerged stones, his hooves splashing and his concentration to keep from stumbling.

While I was in France recently, in a village a few kilometers outside of and looking down a beautiful valley toward Lyon, I had the opportunity to talk about buffalo and the Great Plains to a classroom of about 30 nine year old children. They listened attentively and then began asking questions about the American West, what I did on the ranch, and about the buffalo. Fortunately I had a few pictures on a disk, which I was able to show on a large computer screen with the kids gathered around in a semi-circle, and seated on the floor. It was probably the highlight of my trip this time–watching the kids’ eyes light up as their hands shot up to be recognized for their questions: “Is the buffalo a symbol in the U.S.” “Yes! for many things both bad and good. It reminds us of the fact that we almost exterminated it, and it reminds us of its strength and stamina, and its value to the life of the native people of the land. It also has become a symbol for the restoration of the Great Plains,” “How do you catch them?” “We don’t catch them. They are a wild animal, but we try to keep our herd calm.”

By the time you read this article, I will have been in France for about two weeks; so maybe I will change to the present tense and write as if I am already there when in fact I have not yet left the States. I do, however, know where I will be when I arrive. I have often visited Lyon (southeast central France) since I was first there in 1984 as a post doctoral student attending L’université de Lyon II.

Everyone on this ranch is a reader. The four of us who live here full time read lots of books. Most of us read more than one at a time. We read a very wide variety of things ranging from cookbooks and history to biographies and economics, from poetry, novels and coffee table books on lots of subjects, to classics, drama and mythology. We read fiction and non-fiction, newspapers and magazines, even the User’s Guides for the machinery and vehicles.

Once in a while I think that my age is catching up with me. I move a little slower than I once did. My running shuffles me along; and maybe I could still sprint if I really tried, though my youthful sprinting was hardly any faster than it is now. I pay more attention to potential hazards: ice on the river, city traffic, deer along the roads, and machinery than  once did; and I more fully appreciate some things than I did previously: a job well done, a long term friendship, a new friend, a quiet moment alone or not alone, things, moments, people recollected, including the not so good memories:

This final crushing exit of the old year has bashed past with wind and fog and snow for the past three days and slowed the majority of normal, every day activity to the proverbial snail’s pace. The snow and wind continue putting sizable drifts in the driveway, preventing egress or ingress until the weather system breaks and we have an opportunity to plow ourselves out. Once the wind calms from about a 50-70 mph blizzard to an acceptable 10-15 mph breeze, we can actually see progress in our work. The sun will appear and the temps might climb above 0°F.

There are several natural things in the Great Plains that even the most casual visitor will unfailingly notice: space, sky, and wind. Once having entered the Great Plains, the vastness of the space surrounds the visitor/traveler/guest, and its immensity occasionally stuns and sometimes even frightens the passer through. The space extends, seemingly unbroken, forever; and the traveler welcomes the sighting of a mountain range, the riparian vegetation along an ephemeral waterway, a river intersecting the traveler’s path. These things provide a sense of comfort, of orientation, a point of reference on a map. Fences, too, interrupt the visual flow of the land, as does the look of agricultural land as it has altered and interrupted the flow of the land far beyond that of natural geographic variances in the land itself, and it is almost impossible to imagine or visualize accurately what once was.

During the first weekend of this month, I attended the Deadwood Book Festival, a semi- annual affair in Deadwood, SD that features primarily writers from all over but many from South Dakota and other western states. By the time I came away from there, I had acquired three new books: Linda M. Hasselstrom, No Place Like Home; Michael Frosberg, Dan O’Brien, David Wishart, Ted Kooser, America’s Lingering Wild Great Plains; and Rick Bass, The Wild Marsh. I have read the first two titles above cover to cover and am very pleasurably 3/4 through the third. I have also copy-proofed a novel for an old friend and am trying to keep up with the ranch in spite of what the weather throws at us.

Life here at the ranch does not always consist of ranching, and we do not isolate ourselves from the world at large. The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, an annual affair, officially begins in a few days, unofficially it has already begun. Truthfully I’d rather be somewhere else than on my motorcycle during the rally, but sometimes…….well, you know how it is….

Over the years I have had the occasion to know and talk with artists of all kinds, primarily writers, sculptors and painters. In discussions with them about art in general or their work in particular, I will try to lead the discussion around to a single question: “How do you know when the work is finished?” From that question I have received a variety of answers. One poet became a little upset. “What kind of a question is that? I don’t know. That’s for you critics to figure out.”

The primary tenet of our national economy is growth. It does not matter what field that growth takes place in: automobile production, new home construction, mortgage banking, agri-business, farming and ranching, franchise business operations, hi-tech fields of all kinds and on and on endlessly. Growth requires expanded production, expanded markets, ever expanding use of raw materials, expanded development of tapping into ever thinning supply lines of resources.

Fences dictate labor to those who have them built or who build them. Every time I work on a fence I am reminded of the ironic discussion between the narrator and the neighbor in Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall.” In the final twenty lines of the poem the neighbor quotes his father’s saying: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The narrator follows the statement with an introspective consideration.

I have been thinking a lot lately about two huge phenomena that have affected the buffalo from about the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The first concerns the views held by different people regarding the buffalo. The second concerns the views held by different people regarding the land itself, primarily the Great Plains.

Dawn did not break today. It came and went leaving a silver/gray morning light behind. A fine haze obscures the hills beyond the river. A light covering of new snow smoothes out uneven ground. Snow falls lightly in small flakes. A long line of buffalo appears walking along a fence line, east to West, from my left to my right. They are about a half mile away and walking in a single file: cow, calf, cow, calf. The bulls are scattered throughout the file. They are not grazing, just making slow, steady progress. They are going to water, moving toward a spring that runs year ’round. Their weight will break through the thin ice that has formed overnight. They will drink and move on, forming a denser, more compact group once again to graze the pastures. Each buffalo has a layer of snow on its back, and all together they look a little like a brown and tan, black and white, intricately designed, patchwork quilt. From a distance they become almost indistinguishable from their background, except their movement is perceptible if watched closely for a few minutes. Up close the buffalo is a large dark animal with snow on its back. It has rather small, dark, protected eyes in a massive densely furred head. The cows grunt; their last year’s calves stay near them. These calves will accompany their mothers when they go off to have this year’s calf. The youngsters from the previous year will probably go along also, as will two or three other from these small family groups, to form a kind of birthing nursery. After these new calves are on the ground the mothers and their juvenile offspring will rejoin the main herd. It seems to me like an introductory process in which the newest baby is presented and introduced to its extended family. At this time the mother remains anxious and extremely protective of her newborn; and if she feels threatened, particularly by the presence of people, she will likely depart the herd with her calf and do her best to disappear into the hills and ravines. The newborn calf can and will follow her at her pace for miles if need be. Later on she and the calf will return to the herd.

A thin, white smoke rises from the twist of sage and sweetgrass. The holy man presents a prayer, carried by the smoke to the four directions, then to the earth and to the sky. A soft, regular drumbeat accompanies his prayer as he regards the small circle of men and women and begins an honor song to the herd of buffalo standing quietly about a quarter of a mile away. The holy man, then, proceeds to each person standing in the circle and offers the sacred smoke for them to waft over themselves. It is dawn, and it is on the Cheyenne River Ranch immediately before we move out to make meat for Wild Idea.

In late November the buffalo went out to pasture on grasslands managed by the US Forest Service. That was shortly after a relatively early, tough and somewhat destructive blizzard that we dug ourselves out of when the skies cleared. The one or two good things about the blizzard were that it was not very cold and it provided some welcomed moisture.

Mist lay along the river like smoke. The sun climbed slightly above the hills overlooking the river. Buffalo began to move out of the mist and into the sunlight. The chill would soon go out of the air; the mist would burn off the river. I saw Erney leave his cabin and turn left along the front of the building on his way to feed and water the partridge we raise for release. The horses came into the corral anticipating a portion of oats; so I complied and walked out to give some to them.

I have always liked the Fall of the year. When I was a child, I liked the Fall because it meant Halloween and Thanksgiving. It was door to door Trick or Treats, when the only trick on the kids was somebody jumping out of the bushes. That was before the beginning of screening candy apples for razor blades. Then it was Thanksgiving with all the hoopla of the Horn of Plenty. It was Pilgrims and Indians sitting down at the feast table together—well, at least in the grade school programs.

For about five or six weeks this summer we had a young Austrian/American man helping out on the ranch. He is now back in Switzerland for a short visit with his parents before returning to school. Ben Cunningham, the eighteen year old son of friends of the ranch, has now learned, perhaps more than he ever wanted to know about taking out old and building new barbed wire fence, about compensating for pastures with little pasturage, and about moving buffalo through a working corral system–something that for us is probably a less than once a year activity. What he probably really learned most is that the legendary romance of the west is, in reality, not very romantic.

At the ranch I live in a small, but rather comfortable, second floor apartment. It has a nice view overlooking the Cheyenne River Valley and into both Little and Big Corral Draws, which empty into the river. It is real summer now and my cooling system consists mainly of trapping the cool evening and early morning air and breezes in my rooms. This convection system mostly works unless, like today, I forget to close up the well-insulated structure and my window fan pumps hot air into the apartment.

Having just read a few of my archived River Ranch Diary entries, I realized that something was missing because we are not just about buffalo and grass and water and fences. We are also about food (principally Jill’s venue–and who better?), health (each of us has his or her own very close encounters with that–broken bones, illnesses, events, and surgeries). environment (a major concern in all our lives), and wildlife. In this entry I want talk about wildlife. Primarily, I will address birds.

Not all ranches operate in country where the “buffalo roam, where deer and antelope play;” but this one does. In the winter the antelope gather into large groups and flow about the land like schools of fish. At this time of year (Spring/Summer) the does are off having their babies and are just now bringing them out of hiding. (I saw a pair of Twins with their mother last Sunday–the first I’ve seen all season.) the bucks are scattered out, presumably establishing territory for the coming rut.

I have just recently returned from a road trip to Austin, TX, where I went to visit my son, Greg, his wife, Michelle, and their two children, Mary and Esther. I had not seen them for quite some time; so the visit was nice, though brief.

I think I was about twelve years old when I saw my first buffalo. My mother had decided to take her Girl Scout Troop, of which my two older sisters were members, on a weekend camping trip to the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge, not too far from where we lived in Lawton, OK. There were not nearly as many buffalo in the refuge as there are now; but I remember my mother pointing them out as we drove passed on the then gravel road. And that was that. Camping out was much more exciting; buffalo was interesting enough for being just another large animal to glance at and maybe watch out for as we rolled by on the way to Camp Boulder.

We are rapidly emerging from our slow season. The work is beginning to pick up its pace a little, which means that the horses hooves must be trimmed in preparation of our Spring roundup. That the corral be checked to make certain that everything is in proper working order and repaired if necessary. That the water system is readied for use ( the tanks need to be cleaned and filled). That fences be checked and repaired as needed. So everything is about normal except the amount of moisture in the ground that the pastures need to grow. We want snow or rain and plenty of it, but we have seen little, at least not on that broad scale that benefits the ranch – the broad scale of the grass.

In many respects this month has been rather slow at the ranch–and at times a little bleak. The buffalo are out on the US Forest Service ground; so we see them infrequently. And we have had almost no snow when everywhere else on the Great Plains has had more snow than they want or need. We have had hardly enough to measure. We have, however, had our share of cold weather, at least a couple of weeks of well below 0°F at night. Lately it has been warmer than usual, still no moisture; but the wind, a Great Plains given, continues to blow.

This morning I am waiting to learn what is supposed to happen with the weather. The Weather Channel is on the on behind me, distracting me with its constant run of sound bytes. My windows overlooking the Cheyenne River valley are also behind me, calling softly to me to look out and see what the weather is and what it has already brought. This “waiting to learn” is not comfortable; it is not ordinary for me. Typically I take the weather in the present tense, as I meet it in the now, at this time. In that respect I sometimes fancy myself a little like the other animals that inhabit these great plains, yet knowing full well that I am not them.

On Sunday, November 26, the buffalo went back out on the Big Corral Draw unit of the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands. Erney and I took them to what we call the main gate,” which I had already opened. We watched them go through, proceed to the river, cross it, and head almost at a lope up the slope to the top of Zebell Table. We watched them disappearing into the hills and draws of the government ground. I was glad to see them go. Not because I was tired of them, but rather to have them off the hard-pressed pastures on the “private ground” of this ranch. These pastures need a rest; even during the winter’s dormant period, they generate and replenish themselves. Like people, the pastures, too, can stand a vacation.

Two years ago Nancy Anderson, Director of the Leslie Powell Art Gallery in Lawton, OK invited me to speak at their Lunch Bag Lecture series. We finally were able to schedule a date; so on October 19 of this year I was there to talk about “Great Plains, Buffalo, Restoration, and Other Stuff.” The audience was at least nominally familiar with the American Bison because of Lawton’s proximity to the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge, which has held a herd of buffalo since 1907 and today has a herd of about 550 animals, which also is one of the major attractions for anyone who has family visitors or house guests. The refuge is Lawton’s answer to Mt. Rushmore, the Liberty Bell, Niagara Falls, the Royal Gorge, or Old Faithful. Much of my talk dealt with the practical concerns of how a private ranch can implement practices that can contribute to the restoration of both the Great Plains and the buffalo, and to do so I often used examples from this ranch and the things we have done here to expedite some of our restoration efforts. These examples included details: of fence removal and construction, of conversion of a ranch from cattle to buffalo, of grazing on public lands, of harvesting and marketing–which is a lot to cover in a short lunch hour. The real glitch to restoration is probably three-fold. A) What was once open range has become a crazy quilt of closed ranges, a hodge podge of deeded and public lands where everything is fenced off, thus preventing natural migration. B) Bison survival, when extermination was imminent, depended almost exclusively on ownership by private individuals or government agencies. Ownership hold the animal to be, if not an asset, a liability. Unmanaged buffalo on closed ranges can devastate a range and reach a point of die off, which in an ownership configuration is not acceptable. To prevent such an occurrence the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge, like Custer State Park, has an annual roundup and auction. C) Climate goes a very long way in controlling water availability and grass production. Animals on a closed range that has insufficient water must rely on artificial water production, ie., wells, stock dams, dugouts, or hauled water. With insufficient grass the rancher must feed hay or transport the herd to less or unaffected areas. The trick in all of this is a balancing act. Times of plenty are easy, tending to lull the owner into a sense of security, which he or she has no right to have. Times of dearth are anything but easy, tending to create a sense of panic, which, again the rancher has no right to have. In times of the old, open range the roller coaster of plenty and dearth must have been an excruciatingly slow and horrific movement between heaven and hell; climate managed everything good or bad. In these times of closed ranges, human beings try to alance on the tight wire of management stretched between the high points of the roller coaster ride, staying alert in times of plenty, being creative in times of dearth. The management of this ranch has a three-fold responsibility also: to our range, to our animals and to our customers, a responsibility to balance on the scale of producing high quality meat–no matter what the climate may bring to us and to maintain our herd in balance with our necessarily closed range.

A couple of weeks ago we had a nice Fall rain–finally. The buffalo were in a pasture on the other side of the river, which is not always a good situation. The river rises, taking the fences that span the river with it on its tumultuous way downstream. This untoward event leaves the buffalo herd unhindered from drifting up to higher ground and into the U.S. Forest Service land where the cattlemen leasees still have their herds on the summer pastures. It would not be good for us to encroach on their grazing, even as a result of this high river, act of nature event.

Today I’m writing from Lawton, Oklahoma, the place where I grew up and from which I left more than a few years ago. Some of you may be familiar with the Lawton/Ft. Sill area. If so, you will also be familiar with the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge; if not, perhaps by the end of this article, your interest will be a little piqued, because this refuge is the home of one of (if not) the earliest national American Bison herds. If I remember correctly, this herd was established with about fifteen buffalo shipped by train to Cache, OK in 1905. The small group was then herded about five miles or so from the railway to the refuge area.

A low profile part of our prairie grazing program, having little to do with the romance of building fence, moving the herd on horseback, seeing Curly Bill, the legend, or taking pictures of golden buffalo calves is obtaining a scientific baseline of the vegetation on the ranch to see what exactly is going on with the interactions of the flora, the weather and gazing.

As noted in last month’s RRD, we were bringing the buffalo in during early April. The time I wrote about concerned a group of about forty animals. We had maybe forty in already so that left maybe a hundred animals to gather, which made the middle of April a very busy few weeks. We spent a lot of time just looking for the animals, sometimes by air. One of our neighbors is a pilot, and he helped us, but he has his own work, too. Twice we got calls from Pine Ridge Reservation saying that a few bison had apparently gotten through the fence. We went there to bring them back but by the time we got there, there were no buffalo. That racks up a lot of miles for the truck and the horses, not to mention the wear and tear on what I sometimes call the “geriatric division of Wild Idea Buffalo,” namely me, Dan, and Erney.

Three people in the cab of a pickup truck pulling a horse trailer and approaching yet another gate. That’s the situation. Here’s the question: who is the real cowboy/girl? Answer: the one in the middle–doesn’t have to drive, doesn’t have to get the gates.

On March 15th, after a nearly two week absence from the ranch, I returned to the Cheyenne River, where the Badlands meets the Black Hills. I had been in Oklahoma, mostly with family and in somewhat atypical, dry, warm times. By the time the Ides of March had arrived, South Dakota had been blanketed by about a foot of snow, but on that day the roads were dry and clear. For obvious reasons no rural person that I talked with was complaining about the snow. Well, they (that ambiguous and amorphous they) call this “next year’s country,” meaning next year will be better. Next year the crops won’t be hailed out; next year it will rain at all the right times and water will once more fill the stock dams; next year we’ll make some money; grain and cattle prices will soar; nest year all manner of thing will improve. So, if the present snow is any indication, this is the beginning of next year, the year for which the eternal optimist has long been waiting.

Recently I have read an interesting book, 1491, New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, which considers in a fair amount of depth and breadth, the impact and effects that some very populous cultures had on the environments in which they lived. These cultures existed throughout the American continent, extending from the ancient Siberian land bridge through North America, Mexico, and Central America to South America. The book presents the work of scholars and researchers in a way that is very readable, very interesting, and extremely challenging. The stylistic presentation reminds me somewhat of Robert Ardrey’s, African Genesis, which I read sometime in the mid-seventies. Ardrey’s book primarily considered the emergence of the human specie based on the scholarship and research of many anthropologists, archeologists, and geologists. Of course, if you do not happen to accept the idea of an evolutionary emergence of humankind from prior species, you will likely not appreciate this book. Likewise if you hold to the notion that pre-Columbus inhabitants of the American continent existed by hardly making an ecological footprint on their environments, you will likely have a very difficult time with this book. But if you have a mind that is open to possibility and probability, you will likely end up admiring the work and re-considering some of the views you may hold regarding these ideas. I know I have, and I recommend the book to you.

After spending a quiet New Year’s Eve dinner with Dan and Jill, an early to bed and not so early to rise, and after taking care of my morning chores, I am welcoming this new year by watching a light, misty rain turn slowly and gently into a thin layer of ice covered by a snowfall that actually looks like it could amount to something worthwhile. By that I mean the precipitation might put some much-needed moisture in the ground.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a “Wilderness Symposium” held in Rapid City. The four presenters represented a wide variety of concerns and beliefs, about proper uses of public land. But it was not only a question about public land use that attracted me, it was specifically a question about the Indian Creek Draw area and a proposal to designate that area as the first wilderness area within a national grassland, the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands. This issue interests me particularly because this Wild Idea Buffalo company ranch holds a winter grazing allotment that includes that area. We fenced that area, and more, for buffalo, and that fence benefits every ranch that borders it and every rancher that has a summer cattle grazing allotment. Here’s the catch. From that symposium I learned that no two people can or will define wilderness in the same way; and, as I have not yet read the Indian Creek Wilderness Proposal, I cannot now comment on its definition of and concerns for wilderness. I do, however understand that neither theories nor the reality of wilderness are simple issues.

Because I have retired from academia does not mean I have quit reading or have walked away from literature. Not by a long shot, folks. I am almost always reading at least two books, usually one fiction and one non-fiction.

August and September are months in which we make preparations for the months to come. The operation here at the ranch ordinarily moves at a fairly regular and steady pace. Of course we take care of all the usual maintenance of fences and machinery, of the household repairs and remodeling, of the injuries to horses and dogs as they come along. But this ranch is not exactly the same as those of our neighbors. We are building a new corral for “working” the buffalo. Our “working” the animals consists mostly of ear tagging those that will go into the U.S. Forest Service grasslands in November. Each animal that goes on to the grasslands must be identifiable, and as we don’t brand the calves, the ear tags are the acceptable identification. This “working” also allows us to sort out the ones we will keep here on the private ground. So the new corral will have to be completed in time for us to prepare the herd for moving into the grasslands for the winter.

In my travels, I have marveled at mountains and forests, deserts and prairies, glaciers and grasslands. My travels have been by almost every mode of transportation: car, bus, train, motorcycle, bicycle and boat. I have always been an outdoorsman: hiking, camping, fishing, and hunting; so I always thought I had a pretty good feeling for the land.

D-Day plus sixty-one years makes me think about my father on the Normandy Invasion. I was eight years old. Today I am working on horseback with Dan and Jill. We have located a group of our buffalo that took advantage of a washed out river crossing and went back into the U.S. forest Service grasslands. Now all of those cows have calves, and we have devised and are executing a plan to bring them in again. The concentration on the job at hand neatly supersedes reminiscence about D-Day.

Not everything on a buffalo ranch looks like a romantic view of the new or old West. Some things are not the least easy or pretty or fun. Some are frustrating, difficult, and downright ugly.

The Wild Idea Buffalo herd, having wintered within the seemingly interminable fence we built last year around the Corral Draw and Indian Creek units of the U.S. Forest Service managed grasslands, is now back on the private summering lands of the ranch. Admittedly there was not just a little trepidation among us regarding the retrieval of the herd from the huge, rugged, buffalo-perfect habitat. Adding to the anxiety about possible difficulties with our task was the imminent approach of calving, which could make the bringing of the herd out and in immeasurably difficult.

As you well know, buffalo are our business. I don’t just mean in a strictly commercial sense. I mean that it behooves us to know something about them for entirely other reasons: there is always a safety concern; there is a concern about the dynamics of the herd in motion, their powerful herd bonding instinct. I mention these two things because I understand that a lot of people, whether or not they are our clients or customers of Wild Idea, vacation in places where they may encounter a buffalo herd: in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks or at the Great Salt Lake’s Antelope Island State Park or South Dakota’s Custer State Park or the Wichita Mountain National Wildlife Refuge (where I hail from) in southwest Oklahoma. Or, for that matter, here at the ranch; so I want to try to give you a better idea of what you are looking at when you see it. And when you snap that perfect buffalo picture and want you to remain safe. Upon entering any of the parks and refuges that have a buffalo herd, you will see a roadside sign informing you that the American Bison is a wild animal and , therefore, can be extremely dangerous, and you will be cautioned to remain in your vehicle. This advice is good, unless you happen to be riding a bicycle or hiking and come upon buffalo crossing your path. Discretion will tell you to wait quietly at a safe distance until they have passed. Should they decide to camp out for an extended period on the trail, impatient discretion dictates that you move to one side and around the animals. The trick is to maintain that “safe” distance. The buffalo’s personal space varies, but the idea is to be sure that your presence has almost no effect on the herd or its individual members. They may notice you and choose to ignore you; they may notice you and move away from you; they may notice you and turn toward you. That first response is what you are looking for. Anything other than that – well, you are on your own hook. If you can remain benign, you will be able to watch them in natural motion, grazing or going to water, or bouncing like they sometimes do, just to change location. It’s really quite a sight. It’s thrilling in a calming sort of way. Generally a cow leads the herd. How she is chosen or how she exerts her status or influence over the others, I have no idea; but when she decides to go somewhere, the herd goes with her. When moving the herd, one simply expedites the move by recognizing the lead cow and gently keeping her pointed in the right direction without confusing her. When the herd moves, whether on its own or having been encouraged to move, the herd merges into a group. Each cow brings her calf and usually her yearling with her into the phalanx and joins the movement. This movement of a three animal unit into a herd often appears symmetrical; so when the herd moves, the individual two or three animal units are readily discernible. The two year old and older bulls are less predictable. One can recognize them easily, but cannot usually see them as part of a two or three animal unit symmetry. For the most part, the buffalo herd in motion seems to be relatively disciplined. That sounds more than a little anthropomorphic, but I don’t know of a better word. As I said before, buffalo are our business, we have to …

October 2004 2nd entry Last evening the Fifth Annual Spring Creek School Soup and Pie Supper was held. Two weeks ago the Folsom community Club hosted its annual Supper, Bazaar, and Auction, which also took place at the Spring Creek elementary School. Both events are designed as fundraisers for the school, the Folsom Volunteer Fire Department, and the Folsom Community Club itself. I attend these functions; even though I have no kids in school, and even though I am a member of the Fire Department, I attend these events because of the camaraderie and community spirit that happens in this politically, racially, economically, and religiously diverse rural, western prairie community. Everybody tells stories about the winter of 1985 or of the strange, unpredictable things they have witnessed: a beaver that couldn?t get back through his hole in the ice because it had already frozen over, or a rattlesnake that had eaten another rattlesnake almost as large as itself; everybody talks about the weather, the current jobs and related problems, the prospects for next year, ?Of what is past, Passing, or to come.? (W.B. Yeats, ?Sailing to Byzantium?) Most of these people are cattle ranchers who raise horses and put up a little hay. Some, besides us, the wildideabuffalo bunch, have buffalo and on occasion the conversation comes around to buffalo; and we are called on to answer questions pertinent to the ranching community at large. These questions cover everything from the dimensions of our fences to our meat production processes, our animal and range management program, and our marketing practices. There are several reasons for this. First, they are just plain interested, curious and probably have never worked with buffalo. Second, if they share a fence with us, they are genuinely pleased because they benefit and/or have benefited by that sharing: they have the use of it and did not have to build it. Third, our production processes and marketing practices (about which our client/customers are familiar) differ from their own, which raises a natural curiosity about how and why we do what we do. Fourth, our animal and range management program: no making steers out of bulls, no assistance in calving, minimal sorting of animals, re. gender or age. What all of these do for us is: a) minimize stress to the animal, which is of paramount importance, and b) reduce the high labor intensity of those activities, which savings we pass along to our client/customer. If we think of wildideabuffalo as an extended family or a community, we participate in and partake of the very best part of the ancient traditions of which the American Bison was and is the central figure.

Five days ago we finished the 23 miles of fence–well, essentially. And five days ago we ate a sandwich with one hand while we tamped posts with the other. We were watching a monster cloud build up in the northwest, and we had a lot of equipment way back on the other side of the Cheyenne River–not the best of situations. So as soon as we finished with a piece of equipment, we loaded it up and got ready to move it out. People and hand tools were the last out. The fence was done, but the river was rising from rain somewhere upstream. It had not quite gotten to us yet, except for a few really promising sprinkles, something less than a shower. But we don’t fool around with the water in the river; it runs mercilessly downhill and takes stuff like equipment and people with it, or tries. About the time I got up one morning a little while ago, the phone rang. It was Chad Hammerstrom. He was calling on his cell phone from the middle of the river and was wondering if I could bring the tractor and all the chain I could find to pull his truck with him and his brother, Tel, out. And that is the problem with having an abundance of water. Water in the river, however, is one thing. It does not equate with water in the stock tanks and dugouts or on the pastures and hay ground. This summer the lack of water, other than in the river, is our major problem. Right now wells and a few springs are our primary source of water for keeping the buffalo alive and inside our fences. W.lllle have put in some pipelines and watering tanks, trying to have sufficient quantity for the buffalo in whatever pasture they happen to be at any given time. With no water (read rain) there is minimal grass, which makes for a multitude of problems and possible solutions. Grass is the foundation of meat; water is the foundation of grass. Water in a confined space and under pressure (a cylinder, perhaps, with no outlet) acts like a solid. That same water in that same space under that same pressure with an outlet acts like water gun or a fire hose and is used for thousands of purposes, often as an eroding agent. Water within an open confinement (a lake or a bathtub) acts for the most part like a toy, soft, pliable, splashy and playful. Water as a solid (ice) or a semi-solid (snow) or even liquid water beneath the surface is sometimes a little less than friendly, but ice and snow melt to replenish the dry stock dams, and to re-hydrate the prairie to produce grass; and we all know where that leads. So, when you someday step into a doorway out of the rain, or sleet, or hail, or snow, just remember that as a result of your momentary discomfort grass will be there to provide the grazing for our buffalo and that meat is the next stage in the cycle. I love to look across the Cheyenne River valley, into Indian Creek Draw and into both Little and Big Corral draws, and see a beautiful mist hanging low and cool on a sunlit morning after a good rain or a snowfall. Then I know I can relax and feel relatively secure in the knowledge that a high quality of life will come to us with an appropriate abundance of water.

The cottonwood trees at the ranch headquarters are shedding their leaves in a tumble of green tinted gold. The breeze carries a new scent, a harbinger of winter’s chilling winds. I’ve seen a lot of coyotes lately. Their coats are becoming plush and full with those silver-gray and yellowish to brown casts. They bark and sing quite a bit these nights and even sometimes these days. A couple of prairie falcons have begun once again to hang out along the driveway where they have been the last two winters. Winter is coming. I hope it brings snow to fill the stock dams with water, rain doesn’t seem to do the job-so we want snow. It was about this time a couple of years ago when Dan called me and asked me about coming back to South Dakota to do what I’m doing. Obviously I came, and a short two years later all of our job descriptions have changed. We have become a somewhat smoother running outfit than we were. The effects of that on the buffalo are obvious to me. The buffalo know us better and, therefore, are easier for us to be around. We have circulated them from pasture to pasture enough that they know what is happening about the time that we open one set of gates and close another. They almost anticipate us, which makes our job easier; but more importantly, it puts less stress on them. Without human intervention and without any other predator the buffalo have no reason to be stressed. We open the pastures as much as possible, largely to reduce and/or relieve the stress that confinement puts on them. Yesterday I put one of the herds into a new pasture. The animals hesitated briefly at the new gate, and then a couple of cows and calves ventured across that line and headed at a trot for the Cheyenne River. The rest of the herd in their burnt-gold, tan and brown to black casts of color charged through that gate, rumbling, thundering toward the river, which perhaps none of them had ever seen. It was as if an explosion of genetic memory had burst into reality. All of the animals, from the oldest, slowest cow, the biggest bull and the smallest calf started bucking and running about, butting heads and kicking just for the fun of it. They plowed into the water, took a long, cold drink of fresh running water, went to the crossing, up an old trail cut into the riverbank and streamed into a new pasture. They are now one stage closer to their newest, biggest ever winter pasture–the one we have spent ten months preparing. Five weeks from now will see them on the U.S. Forest Service managed grasslands. For this ranch Thanksgiving will have a new significance–buffalo on about twenty-two thousand acres (without internal or cross-fencing) of where they belong.

Yesterday I was on the high bluff overlooking the Cheyenne River where it transects this ranch. The valley winds down toward the little town of Wasta, twenty miles away. The river meanders and flows over rocks and sand, carrying fine clay silt, depositing it in the broader, flatter bends and curves of its water course. All in all, the entire river is a beautiful sight. From where I was I could see the water coming out of Big Corral Draw Creek at its confluence with the river. There is green grass along the riverbanks: so the cattle that are presently on the U.S. Forest Service grasslands frequently hang out along and on the riparian vegetation beside the riverbanks and the contiguous floodplain. There are cottonwood trees in a broad expanse of the river bottom. That area provides habitat for antelope, deer, coyotes, skunks, porcupines, and raccoons, several kinds of birds of prey including kestrels, red – tailed hawks, Cooper’s hawks, and golden eagles. There are also crows, meadowlarks, three kinds of woodpeckers, several varieties of snake: including garter, green racer, bull, and prairie rattler, not to mention prairie dogs and burrowing owl as well as a few kinds of mice, more than a few species of insect, lots of grasses, forbs, and sedges. Well, you get the picture. It’s almost idyllic – except for the drought. The Cheyenne River is the carotid artery or the jugular vein of life in this area. Often taken for granted, like the picture on the postcard; often perceived as an obstacle to be dealt with, a barrier, an inconvenience; sometimes understood as a threat, that old irresistible force that overwhelms even the immovable object. But the river is just water, doing what water does, seeking its own level first, and everything else be damned. It is water, sustenance, life. Even in this drought the river flows. It slips around corners and slides downstream sometimes at its leisure, sometimes in its haste. Rain from upstream and in the Black Hills sends water down, raises and broadens the river temporarily. It’s truly a wonderful phenomenon, a spectacle even in its placid times. The Cheyenne River and this ranch share about three miles of riverbank. We enjoy easy and immediate access to the river, which is fenced into the holdings of the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands. It is the river and its watershed that provides the majority of the drinking water for the cattle herds that are permitted into the grasslands that the Forest Service’s National Grasslands provide. During the summer we do not have use of that water but over the winter we will, as that is the area we have been fencing for almost a year. The problem we faced this summer was to make the best use possible of the grass and water within the deeded portions of the ranch until such time as we are permitted to put a substantial part of our herds into the leased, U.S. Forest Service managed, grasslands. In order to alleviate the problem of drinking water for the herds, we have installed some pipelines from a couple of wells and some water tanks in several of the pastures as the stock dams all are dry. One particularly hot day I happened to be near one of these round, galvanized tanks filled with cold, clear water. The buffalo were perhaps a couple hundred yards away, lying quietly, chewing their cuds and particularly uninterested in this farmer-tanned, stripped-down, two-legged who (bare parts shinning in the sun) rolled over the edge or the tank and into that chill, refreshing water.

Over the past months I have written more about taking out old and putting in new fence than anybody ever thought to read. But, now the end of this Cheyenne River Ranch fencing project is drawing near. And, well, I hope one more article on the subject would not be amiss. We can actually see the end where the final post will go, where the last wire is to be stretched and the last staple hammered into place. And with the end in sight comes the reality that there will always be loose ends to tie up and that the job of fencing is never really over. A few days ago came the welcome reprieve of the Granary Girls: the folk duo Patty Kakac and Jodi Ritter who had made plans to visit for part of a day. I met them in the driveway. We talked for a few minutes then piled into the pickup to tour part of the ranch and make a visit to the buffalo herd. Both of these women are country girls, so riding the ranch truck and working the gate latches were nothing new to them. The way we build our fence was, in part, new to them. But, what was really new was the proximity from which they were able to see/watch/observe the buffalo. And that is what we did until we began to run out of daylight. With the sun setting behind us, we headed back to the ranch house to enjoy a beer. Dan and his brother Scott had arrived just in time for introductions, and to join the Granary Girls and me on the deck for an open air folk session. Jodi and Patty brought their guitars, harmonica, and penny whistle, and we brought beer. I had recently listened to one of their CDs, The Wild Roses, and knew what to expect. They played and sang to the slightly scruffy, most attentive and appreciative audience of three. And in the open air, Scott and Dan’s enthusiastic response equaled my own. Perhaps this little celebration was a somewhat pre-mature ending for this major project. The gathering lacked the company of Chad Hammerstrom and his brother Tell, who have proven to be the best fence builders I’ve seen. And with them absent that evening, a certain sadness lingers at the ending. This project brought together a diverse group of people with a single purpose and managed to forge them into a team-spirited workforce. Almost a year later now, it will send them once again back to their own. For us, The Granary Girls’ visit marked a point in the history of this ranch. So, if someday you see them on a billing somewhere–maybe Northfield, Minnesota, or Gayville Music Hall in South Dakota, or some other venue on the great northern plains-go see them. Order a beer, listen to some original, old time, folk music and think about the sun setting on the Cheyenne River Ranch. “Let the wild grass grow on the prairie/Let the buffalo roam again/Wheat grass, sweet grass, side-oats gramma/The Little and the Big Blue Stem/Of long ago/Let the wild grass grow.” Let the Wild Grass Grow by Patty Kakac, 2004

I spent yesterday morning taking out an old barbed wire stack yard–a storage area for hay within a pasture. The stack of hay is fenced in to prevent animals from using it before the winter season. For our purposes with the buffalo, we don’t need stack yards and do not wish to have the animals wander into them; so we remove the old wire and fence posts. Working alone, I have the relative quiet of the location among some cottonwood trees along the old river bottom, and the solitude (and/or isolation) to experience a little silence away from the demands of working with machinery and people. Even so, I was still working with a few hand tools and of course the uncontrollable barbed wire. Not my favorite, but the day was pleasant and I was perfectly at ease with the job, the end result of which is about a half pick-up load of hand rolled wire and a bunch of steel posts. I finished about noon and came back up to the house where I met Emily Schwing, an intern from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota who is working here for the summer. She has been working as a ranch hand and doing some research of people long ago gone from both the deeded and leased areas of this ranch, the homesteaders and other landholders who have since sold out and moved away. The real purpose for being where I was had little to do with the stack yard. That was just an excuse, I suppose, a reason to get a closer look at the natural habitat of the wildlife. The work gives me several hours of being in a single place, moving around the place several times in a not too hurried manner: unclipping and unstapling wires, rolling the wire, pulling and stacking posts and finally loading everything into the truck to haul it off. While working, I listen to and watch birds: flickers, redheaded and hairy woodpeckers, sharp tailed grouse, and meadowlarks (I dislocated a half-grown one from its nest). I can observe antelope, deer and rabbits. There are reptiles: garter, green racers, rattlesnakes (although none on this trip) and bull snakes. There are cavities in the cottonwoods from which kestrels fledge their young and a pair of Cooper’s hawks whose nest I have not yet located. Then there is the flora within the confines of this roughly 30×25 yard area that has been essentially untouched since the stack yard was emptied no less than five years ago. So, the prairie sand weed, blue gramma, buffalo grass and snowberry has had a chance to dislocate the Japanese boume and cheat grass. Then it strikes me. The homesteaders too have been dislocated, perhaps not altogether accidentally, by the western prairie habitat for the most part better suited to a thoughtful stewardship of ranching rather than traditional, old-style European farming techniques.

Ranching carries a kind of romanticized mystique about it, some of which is true. This mystique is what we love to love about ranching, which also carries an oftentimes harsher reality to it. This reality is what we love to hate about ranching. On the grounds of the homesite here on the ranch, stands a wonderful Flowering Crab. Having now blossomed and today being somewhat past its prime, looking a little wounded, as the aftermath of that blooming, the tree is leafing out beautifully. The day the tree had completely blossomed, I went out to stand beneath its limbs. The tree hummed, droning to the wingbeat of thousands of honey bees; the sound reminding me of the massive pulsing drone of W.W.II bomber formations of which T.S. Eliot wrote: In the uncertain hour before morning Near the ending of interminable night At the recurrent end of the unending After the dark dove with the flickering tongue Had passed below the horizon of his homing…. (“Little Gidding,” ll. 78-82) As I looked closer, I began seeing the bees as they flew across the interstices between branches, limbs, and twigs, then as they crawled on the flowers. What a pleasant and sensory surprise in the rough-out West. We also have a new foal, born in the early morning hours of May the first. Like most foals, she’s a beauty: all legs with a white, left, hind hoof and a tornado looking white blaze on her face (it twists to the left by the time it reaches the end of her nose), a silvery-gray baby coat. We’re guessing what her adult color will be. The odds right now favor blue roan. We’ll just have to wait and see. Her mom, Ginger, is doing well and takes very protective care of her little girl. There is not a lot of romantique mystic in the above: no riding and roping, no sunsets to ride into, no stars to sleep under, but those things fall under the category of what we love to love about ranching. Here, then, are some of what we love to hate about ranching. First, it’s been way too dry for way too long; but I’ll bet that after it finally rains for a week (making a very optimistic assumption here) and everybody is grinning big because we have water in the ground, there will be way too much mud. We certainly don’t like to deal with cold-natured machinery on super cold days or with knothead horses on any day. (Knothead is a technical term for: Sale or Trade.) We hate not having the right supplies for a job because we’re so far from town, even though we really like the distance from town; so we don’t like inefficiency and wastefulness or making mistakes, particularly when someone is watching; and we do not tolerate dangerous carelessness. There is no percentage in being a statistic on the negative side of the scale. We really love to hate being snagged, dragged, or slapped in the face by a strand of springy, unruly, barbed wire, being kicked, bit, or struck by that knothead horse; we hate fixing flats. This is all on a scale relative to the weather; hard-winter, subzero cold and mud at night being on one side of the scale, warm days in the garage with shop stools and no cool beer being on the opposite extreme and both being what we love to hate. We have the beginnings now of a new crop of buffalo calves. If you have never seen one, try to make plans to go somewhere to see them. …

I’ve been waiting for Spring. I suppose we all have, particularly those who have born the brunt of a hard winter, but I have been waiting for spring rains to ease the burden of a relatively mild and very dry winter. I see the birds returning from the South: the White-crowned sparrows, the Harriers coursing the prairie, performing their mating ritual display flights, the great swirling flocks of Sandhill cranes migrating back to us and beyond, the huge flights of geese: Canadas, Blues, Whites, the Pintail ducks and Widgeons, Scaups and Mallards. I see the horses shedding their ruffed winter coats on the way to becoming sleek and shiny again; I see the trees and shrubs budding, the crocus blooming, the peonies in the yard starting to break through the surface of the earth; but most of all I look for that gentle cast and shading of distant green from the grasses in the pastures. We need moisture in the ground that winter did not supply, but we got grass in spite of the dryness.

I’m writing this midmorning as I wait for Dan and Jill to arrive to help with moving the buffalo herd from the River Pasture to one of the other pastures, either Sam’s Barn Pasture or the South Pasture, sometimes called the Bale Pasture. Today looks to be a kind of special day for us in this process, not from the standpoint of moving the herd. That is pretty much old hat. Any of us can accomplish that with a good deal of ease. Today we will add horses into the mix. This addition will be a first for us with these horses; so a new learning curve and process will be underway. Here’s the way it is anticipated to work. Jill and Dan will saddle two of our horses. My doctor has temporarily grounded me from riding; so I and my brother will drive ahead of the herd to open gates and attempt to lead the buffalo, while Jill and Dan ride up behind the herd and encourage them to follow the pickup. At present the buffalo are within 200 yards of the appropriate gate and are strung out about a half mile down the draw that leads up to the gate. The pickup and the horses will have to approach the herd from opposite directions; so the estimated time of arrivals are critical. We don’t want the truck to start the lead animals moving in the wrong direction. From my vantage point in the pickup on the bluff, I could see the riders coming across the valley and starting up the draw. When I opened the gate, the herd began moving toward the opening, and I noticed more animals coming up through the draw; so we just drove slowly away from the gate and into the targeted pasture, Sam’s Barn Pasture. About two minutes after the last buffalo came through the gate the riders came through also. I closed the gate behind them. The entire process worked more smoothly than any of us had anticipated. It is now Saturday, February, 28th and I have since moved the herd into the North Pasture. That was yesterday. Today my brother and I checked the North Pasture fence, a mandatory activity I have assigned myself when the herd goes into a pasture. I do that as a matter of course because of what weather always seems to do to a fence, and as I have said elsewhere, I would rather check and repair the fence than go in search of a renegade herd either on someone else’s property or somewhere in the open expanse of the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, Badlands National Park, or Pine Ridge Reservation.

About three weeks ago, not too long after the buffalo herd had been moved into the newly fenced River Pasture, I was up on a bluff overlooking the Cheyenne River Valley. I was near what we call the old homestead, where an old, abandoned house, a collapsing horse barn, the remains of a corral, and a chicken coop are slowly returning to the ground on which they stand. I was removing a short section of old cross-fencing and an old stackyard fence. From there I would move to the homestead itself and take out the tumbledown, broken fence separating the homestead’s yard from the surrounding prairie pasture. I was unclipping the wires from the steel posts, unstapling them from the wooden posts, and laying them out on the ground in preparation of rolling the wires (this time by hand) and loading them into the pickup.

This evening I watched the buffalo herd come off the bluff northwest of the house. They ambled down the draw that leads to what we call the homestead site and began crossing east through the newly fenced pasture I have dubbed the River Pasture. They paused at various spring-fed water holes and moved slowly eastward, down river. They really like this new pasture. Watching them put me on mind of several things: the magnificence of the animal itself, the solidarity of the herd as a group, (ie., grazing habits, patterns of movement, social structure), and the quality of meat that this animal produces.

Only a few of the Folsom Community families are long time residents of the area. The rest of us have moved in from elsewhere, buying a ranch when one became available. So most of us are newcomers of varying lengths of time. The owners and members of what I will call the Cheyenne River Ranch group, having been on this ranch for less than three years now, and me for being the only permanent resident of this ranch for about one year, makes us the new kids on the block. In many respects that is a good thing. It is a good thing because the land mass of the ranch can be held intact. Neighboring provides a generally hassle-free crossing for trail drives to and from the Forest Service grazing allotments for those who hold the allotments and need the thoroughfare and, occasionally, the corral facilities for sorting and shipping. Neighboring provides the opportunity to join trail drives, gatherings, brandings, and riding with the owners of the cattle that go on and off the Forest Service grazing allotments.

Today was that beautiful day that comes after two or three days of overcast, cloudy, snow-filled skies that reveal little or no sun, that features wind and low visibility all the while creating hazardous conditions for vehicle travel and anyone not prepared for that annual, rude introduction to a South Dakota winter. At times like this I marvel at the hardiness and resilience of the native wildlife.

This morning I was up and about at my usual time, about 5:30. After taking care of a few little chores and getting a quick jump start with my morning cup of coffee and killing a little time, waiting for a reasonable hour, I called my old friend, Erney Hersman, who lives on the Broken Heart Ranch and takes care of that ranch, among other things, as he has done for years. We both more or less work for Dan. Dan met Erney, perhaps as much as a year, probably less, before I met them. That was over thirty years ago.

Everyone who visits the ranch here asks about the flock of turkeys they encounter. “Are these wild turkeys? Do you raise them? Have you picked one out for Thanksgiving? Christmas?” And I respond, “yes, no, no, no.” “But how can they be wild? You just walk through them, almost close enough to grab.” “That’s true,” I say, “maybe ‘wild’ is a relative term. I don’t feed them. They roost every night in the cottonwood trees. I try not to let dogs chase them. They apparently feel safe here, but I know the coyotes picked off a few poults early in the summer and not every hen raised a brood.” “But aren’t they kind of a pest and messy?” “Well, I’ve never run the risk of stepping on one; although I have stepped on a few of their leavings, but this is a ranch, and who on a ranch has not stepped into something unpleasant on a daily basis? I like their company, obviously not for conversation, but they serve as a kind of conversation piece, like the rabbits that raise their young in the shrubbery around the house. They let me read something about the spring-fed woody draw behind the house, the habitat that feeds and harbors them, protects them from natural hazards and reveals their ability to adapt. For that matter deer and coyotes also inhabit that wooded draw along with an array of song and passerine birds, and raptors, none of which I bother. Predators and prey. How can one top that?”

There are several places on this ranch that provoke thought to the observer. In many respects the observer doesn’t even have to be careful. Casual observation will serve quite nicely provided that the observer lets that which is observed register in his or her consciousness as a thought provoking entity. For example you (the observer) might be riding along and notice a corner in a fence that is built with two corner posts that are not connected, and at right angles to one another the two additional posts supporting H structures, so that an aerial view of the corner looks like !._ rather than !_ and one may wonder why use the extra post when for years the common wisdom used the three post configuration rather than the four post. The answer is simple. The four post configuration pulls only in a straight line against itself. The three post configuration pulls or strives to pull the corner post inward, collapsing the corner and loosening the wires, which of course, creates a fence fixing project. For the most part, as one rides by, such an observation may never be let to enter the consciousness, or the rider may simply take the fence for granted and move on. But our goal is to keep the buffalo in their pastures. We don’t need the extra work or the need to redo the same thing continuously. As selfish and naive as it may seem and sound, we would love to have one project finished, and let me tell you one thing, “fencing ain’t it,” but we would like to reduce to a minimum the need to fix something that could/should have been done right from the jump.

A chilly, blustery day for a ride, no sun, possible showers, horses are lively, the clouds are floating around, painting the sky with their shades of grey.

We are only two days away from our first buffalo kill of the year, and things are gearing up fairly rapidly. We’re helping some neighbors gatherr their cattle and bringing them in from the “government ground,” U.S. Forsest Service grazing allottments. The calves will go to the sale barn; the cows and bulls will go home with the owners. It’s not onlyfun work; it’s good neighboring.

On this day in 1954 I enlisted in the U.S.M.C. My mother, my father, and if I remember correctly, my younger brother, Carl, saw me off at the Trailways Bus Station in Lawton, Oklahoma. I was sworn in at Oklahoma City and welcomed some hours later, after my first commercial flight, to the US Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego, California. Nobody is prepared for that!

This date has significance in my famil for several reasons. The first is myy father’s birthday in 1899; the second is the date of my discharge from the U.S.M.C.; and the third is my younger brother’s (now deceased) wedding anniversary.