The Sunday after Thanksgiving, just as the sun was lightening the sky, I sat in my pickup truck on an enormous flatland above the Cheyenne River. I had just finished flying my gyrfalcon, Sally, and she was happily having her breakfast on the ground beside the truck where I could keep an eye on her and frighten off predators that might see her and move in for an easy meal. Usually, I sit beside her in the grass as she eats, sharing a little time with her. She enjoys taking her meal in the fresh, clean, Great Plains air and every morning that I could, I tried to be with her, to simply be quiet for an hour before my day got crazy. But that day, I sat in the truck for two reasons: first, Thanksgiving had assured in a blast of cold air that I was not yet acclimated to, and second, there was a story on NPR’s Weekend Edition that I wanted to listen to. Being an arctic bird, Sally was loving the fifteen degree temperature and the fifteen mile per hour wind. She stood proud and defiant, facing the wind and clutching the last of this year’s migrating mallards. Her eyes were large, solid ebony, slightly squirted, and unblinking into the sun that was now a full hand above the horizon. On that distant horizon, on the other side of the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, in the area called the Conata Basin, one of our buffalo herds moves through native grass like a couple hundred tiny, black phantoms of the forgotten past. At six o’clock that morning NPR had gotten my attention by mentioning the very land that I was looking over. They had promised to talk about the black-footed ferrets of South Dakota’s Conata Basin. Now, as I watched Sally watching the very land that Elizabeth Shogren was talking about, I began to recognize names of people and places that I knew well. Randy Griebel, Travis Livieri, Dean Biggins, Badlands National Park, an assortment of mesas and drainages. Elizabeth Shogren was talking about the center of our nation – my stomping grounds – a place where I could travel, literally for days without seeing another person. I’ve never been shipwrecked but now have an idea what it must be like to be rescued. Thirty years before, I drove the same trails and ridges that Elizabeth described with a biologist who only found a few ferrets in his entire career. In the first six years of this century, when the ferrets were doing well, I rode them again with biologists Randy Griebel and Travis Livieri. We drove in total darkness listening to the likes of Eddie Van Halen and watching for green eyes. I helped trap them, measure them, and give them physicals. I touched them and smelled their musky scent. I stared at them and tried to understand what it would be like to teeter on the edge of extinction. Here is what I learned about ferrets that some people may not know: Thrilling as it is to spot the green flash of their eyes, magnificent as they are to behold, they are most precious for what they represent. They stand in for all that is wild; the coyotes, the swift fox, the burrowing owls, the badgers, and thousand other species. They are a piece of something much greater than anyone alive today has ever seen. And, when our Wild Idea partner bought some ranch land in the Conata basin and began running Wild Idea buffalo on it and the associated federal land leases that supported …