Ghost Riders in the Sky 2

           Gus McCrae: Pretty, ain't they?
           Pea Eye Parker: I reckon
           Gus McCrae: Let's chase 'em. You want to?
           Pea Eye Parker: Shoot us one for our supper?
           Gus McCrae: No, I mean chase 'em just for the sport of it
           Pea Eye Parker: to run them off?
           Gus McCrae: You don't get the point, do you Pea? I mean chase
                                'em, because before long, there won't be any buffalo
                                left to chase.
                                                      Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove


We arrived at the Welcome to the Moiese Mercantile gas pump, plumb on unleaded empty. There were Huckleberry-shakes and Buffalo-burgers painted on the wall of the Burger ‘B’ Drive-in. A rooftop rubric cubic air conditioner whined above the pennants lining the roof slope, like the used car lot from Hell which, from the heat-stroked vehicles lining up outside for gas, it could have been. A life-sized barbwire buffalo greeted us with his legs apart, and his head and horns lowered. I got a similar reaction from the bacon fat goatee and sunglasses and punched-in Stetson, who cut his black and blue Dodge 4x4 in front of me.
What our story lacked so far was an ironic, unexpected event, which would propel the hero into a full-on punched-in black and blue conflict. I looked at Bacon Fat, and took a long, hard think. Never approach a bull from the front, a horse from the rear, or a fool from any direction. I left Robyn with the wagon in the lineup, and defused my cowboy in the Indian shop across the dust. Inside were ‘huckleberry products,’ and a refrigerator full of dead buffalo- buffalo jerky $33/lb, burger meat $10.99/lb, burger patties $11.99/lb, and buffalo stew meat and steaks for apparently no charge. I returned to refuel, and Robyn and I went inside to pay for the gas.
The antique owner behind the counter wasn’t in a talking mood, but I quizzed him anyway.
“How long does it take to drive through the Bison range?” I asked.
“Three hours.” He snorted. “On a good day.”
“Is this a good day?” I asked.
“It ain’t hot.” He said.
“We have to be in Philipsburg for the Vaudeville tonight.” I said.
“It ain’t hot.” He said, again. I wasn’t sure he was referring to the remoteness or the refreshment.
In the end we decided that we had come all the way to Montana to see buffalo.
“Let’s go see some buffalo.” Robyn said. And we drove the few hundred feet to the entrance, under the elk antler arch of the National Bison Range. Established 1908.
“Same year as the Swan River Massacre.” Said Robyn. But I was already studying the public warning. Bison are unpredictable and can be very dangerous. They appear to be slow-moving and docile but are really very agile and can run as fast as a horse. Bulls are especially dangerous during the breeding season from m d July through August. There was no ‘i’ in mid. But there would be, in Kiss your buffalo-gored ass goodbye. We bought tickets inside the kiosk. I asked the ranger how long it would take to drive it.
“Depends on how long you take.” He said, giving less than our Moiese Mercantile methuselah.
“You are about to experience the ultimate American self-drive safari.” He added. “Stay in your vehicle.” He pronounced vehicle with hard ‘h,’ and made us feel like we were entering Jurassic park.
The first part of the safari was sedate. Robyn and I climbed from open grasslands and scrub, into rutted switchbacks of tall yellow grass and sedges, punctuated by lightly wooded hills, with pines in the pubic places, and dust everywhere else. Big blue skies opened onto eroded mauve mountains, their fingers of white clay hoodoo cliffs guarding arroyos below, some still carrying the rare winding river, sleeved with green.
“Buffalo country.” I said. Robyn pointed out a pronghorn, camouflaged in the grass. The black patch on his jaw, gave him away as a male.
“Fastest land mammal in the western hemisphere.” I said. “First described for us by Lewis and Clark. Big heart and lungs, and hollow hair. They can run high speeds longer than African cheetahs, fifty-five miles per hour for a half a mile, likely because they originally evolved to outrun the American cheetah.”
“There is no American cheetah.” Said Robyn.
“There isn’t now.” I said. “And, despite the fact we call it an antelope, with thirteen distinctive kinds of gait, including one that reaches nearly eight yards per stride, it can’t jump. They’ll fly under any rancher’s fence, but can’t get over one, which is why some landowners have removed the bottom wire from their enclosures.”
“Their heads are like those of giraffes.” Robyn said.
“It’s true.” I said. “Like giraffes, their skin covers the skull, but in the pronghorn, becomes the keratinous horny sheath that sheds and regrows every year. They’re interesting in other ways as well. Unlike deer, they have a gallbladder, and are able to eat plants that are toxic to domestic livestock. They migrate every year, across the lava fields of the Craters of the Moon to the Continental Divide, over 160 miles, true marathoners of the American West. You can pretty much predict the behavior of our male friend here, who is very possessive and marks his territory with scent gland musk from the side of his head, vocalizations, and by challenging intruders. The girls are comprised of three strategic groups. Sampling females visit several males for a short time before switching to the next one, at an increasing rate, as oestrus approaches. Inciting females precipitate conflicts between males, and then mate with the winners. Quiet females remain with a single male, in an isolated area. Courting males approach with soft vocalizations, waving their head from side to side, and displaying their cheek patches, like a high school dance.”
“So, how are they doing?” Asked Robyn.
“Better than some. Not as good as others.” I said. “Originally there were twelve species of antilocaprids in North America, dropping to five when the Indians came across the Bering Land Bridge. Now there is only one. By the 1920s, there were only 13,000 pronghorns that hadn’t been shot. They’re back up to half a million, but blue tongue disease from sheep, poaching, livestock grazing, road and barrier construction, and habitat loss are killing them off again. At one point their migration corridor is down to two hundred yards wide.”
As happy as he didn’t look, the mule deer doe, in the splattered shade under the pines at the top of the rise, was miserable. Her ribs projected through the mange of what was left of her hide, her eyes were half closed to the flies, and the only thing in any way upright were her large ears, radiating heat and despair. A barbwire barrier ran behind her, through the trees. Let me be by myself in the evening breeze, Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees, Send me off forever but I ask you please…
“I didn’t think there were supposed to be fences through here.” Robyn said.
“Death and worse happened here.” I said.
There had been over sixty million bison in North America before Columbus arrived, ranging in a big triangle all the way from Great Bear Lake in northern Canada, down to Durango and Nuevo León in Mexico, then east, almost to the Atlantic tidewater.
They had come off their ancestral lineage from water buffalo and African buffalo ten million years ago, as the Eurasian steppe bison that decorated the ancient cave paintings of Spain and Southern France. The European bison descended from steppe bison that had migrated from Asia to North America and back again, where they crossbred again with their steppe bison relatives. Some of these crossbred with the ancestors of the modern yak, and some of them crossed back over the Bering Land Bridge, to become the giant longhorn bison, which was annihilated in the megafauna Quaternary extinction. Two smaller bison subspecies eventually evolved into our North American Bison bison buffalo, about ten thousand years ago.
The Native Americans used them, but they never domesticated them. Every animal was a four-legged grocery, dry goods and  hardware store. For eight thousand years the Plains Indians dried and pulverized the meat, mixed it with berries and bone marrow, and packed it in buffalo skins. Pemmican was an order of magnitude more nutritious than fresh meat, and lasted until the next season. Tanned buffalo hides were sewn with bone buffalo needles into , moccasins and leggings, buckets and cooking vessels, shields and boats, and shelters and bedding. Bone and horns also provided spoons and spikes, drills and scalers, and knives and axes. Children slid down snowbanks on jawbones and ribs. Its hooves were made into glue, its shit was turned into heat, and its spirit was transubstantiated into religion and ritual. When the Red Man finished with a buffalo, he had used it all.
The Indians ate, dressed in, talked to, fought for, and died by the sacred buffalo. Their battles occurred over hunting territory, and the last, the one that ended the old life forever at the slaughter that was Wounded Knee, was fought in magic bulletproof shirts and a ghost dance trance.

                        The whole world is coming
                        A nation is coming, a nation is coming,
                        The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe,
                        The father says so, the father says so,
                        Over the whole earth they are coming,
                        The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming.
       
The Native Americans used them, but they never domesticated them. They have a ‘wild and ungovernable temper,’ weigh over a ton apiece, and can jump six feet vertically (unlike the pronghorn) and charge at forty miles an hour when agitated. At that speed, their hump, which they use as a snowplow in the winter, is a lethal weapon, and their horns, which face forward, can destroy almost anything in their path, including most fencing systems, including most razor wire.
Before the arrival of the horse 1600, the only way the Indians could kill bison, was to deceive them, into running off cliffs, like unsuspecting lemmings. They worshipped the rare white buffalo, as a sacred colour.  Then came white soldiers and settlers, and their cattle, and guns, and railroads, and the Great Slaughter. The Indians watched, horrified, as the iron horses on iron spikes, sprayed lead bullets out of every train window, leaving trails of tens of thousands of one ton animals, and blood and salt, with every passing. Dingdingdingdingdingding…
The white men called it ‘sport.’ Piles of buffalo bones, fertilizer instead of food, soared skyward.


                             ‘The buffaloes I, the buffaloes I
                              I make the buffaloes march around
                              I am related to the buffaloes, the buffaloes.’
                                                                                 Sioux Proverb


The US Army held a campaign in the late 1800s to exterminate bison, as a way to control tribes that depended on them. In the two years between 1872-1874, white hunters killed over three and half million. The winds of the continent were rotten with the stench of their extermination, ordered by General Sheridan as ‘the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance.’
Domesticated cattle contributed tuberculosis and brucellosis and other bovine diseases to their path towards extinction. The same germs, guns, and steel, that Jared Diamond had identified as the cause of the deaths of nearly all the original American human inhabitants, were the cause of the deaths of nearly all the original American buffalo as well.
The future came wearing cow leather shoes and machine-woven pants. Buffalo were in the way of the cow-catchers, interrupting trains, knocking over telegraph poles, stampeding crops, eating grass. Where never was heard, was heard McDonald’s.
At one point in the 1800s, the number of bison had declined to as low as 541 animals. Well-meaning ranchers, in an effort to bring them back, polluted the remnant gene pool with cattle, producing cattleos and beefalos, and other horrendous hybrids. Only the females of the first generation are fertile. According to mitochondrial DNA analysis, which can only track maternal lineage, there now may be as few as 12,000 pure bison left in the world. You don't get the point, do you Pea? I mean chase 'em, because before long, there won't be any buffalo left TO chase.
We stopped in what shadowy shelter we could find, from the vertical glare of the midday sun, for the remains of the vegetarian strudel, leftover from the most beautiful small town in America. The heat was merciless, and Robyn and I were the only source of sympathy and water, for miles.
Our wagon continued higher into the ether, emerging over a montane landscape of yellow haze and purple sage. A patchwork valley lay below, quilted trapezoids of lichen green and ashen grey, with thin ribbons of dark green pine forest along the river, between us and the Bitterroot Mountains on the other side of the horizon.
“They’re named after the flower.” Said Robyn. “And the roots that the Indians ate, when the buffalo disappeared.” We had been in the National Bison Range for over two hours, and had yet to see a single buffalo.
“Maybe they’re hiding.” She said. “Or sleeping somewhere.”
“Maybe” I said. “They usually graze for a couple of hours, rest and cud chew for awhile, move to a new location, and then do it all over again. They cover about two miles a day, depending on the vegetation, water, bugs, and whether they’re rutting or not.” We began singing, to encourage their appearance. Oh, give me a home. Where the buffalo roam, where the skies are not cloudy all day, where never is heard a discouraging word…
But we were getting discouraged. Nothing, it seemed, could entice them to show themselves. I began to wonder if the National Bison Range wasn’t the National Bison Rip-off. I began cursing.
“There’s no #@! bison in these stinkin’ hills. I’ve seen more buffalo at the ranch down the road from our place on the island.” I said. “Just because you hang a sign on a pine post…” And then they came.
They came at first as brown and bearded and humped and horned silhouettes against the sun dazzle and dust, in single file across the path in front of our wagon. They came as the sixty million would have come, heads down, tails up, hammering the ground with their hooves, and substance, and significance.  The males came with their shaggy penises almost touching the ground, red eyes fixed on their females. They came like before they had become mascots and coins and seals and flags and logos, and other symbols, before their heads appeared on the walls of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Richard and Carolyn’s office, or a dozen other legislatures or city halls or universities or sports team locker rooms or military bases, or the US Department of the Interior. They came like they had created the first thoroughfares of America, and they had, in seasonal migrations between feeding grounds and salt licks, following watersheds and ridge lines to avoid the lower summer muck and winter snowdrifts. Their hornings had shaped the genes of pines and cedars, in the wounded aromatic emissions that repelled the voracious insect swarms of the autumn. The trails of their hooves were followed by the Indians, into hunting grounds and warrior paths, traced by explorers and pioneers, paving the way for the railroads to the Pacific. It was the buffalo that mapped the course of the rail beds through the Cumberland Gap, and across the Ohio and Wabash Rivers. And the railways repaid them, through the windows.
A large bull paused in front of us, and fell and rolled laterally and forward, into a small depression in the dust, leaving his scent in the wallow. And then he rose, unlike so many of his ancestors, and moved. Oh, how he moved. Into the sunny slopes of long ago.