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17 3. Elements I’m driving through the heart of Ted Turner’s 360,000-acre private ranch. In the far distance a massive thunderhead billows heavenward against the blade edge of a steep mountain. I reach an automated gate. From the window of the van I punch a combination of numbers into a keypad. In a second a motor hums and the gate rolls open. I hurry through and then watch it close through my rear-view mirror. Just north of Red Lake Well, I see specks of black against a florescent yellow hillside. With binoculars I count five bison. I drive closer and stop. As I get out of the van, each massive beast looks up and eyes me cautiously. They are unlike any bison I’ve ever seen – not zoo creatures , but as rugged and as wild as the Old West. Their beards are scraggly, their eyes dark and menacing. A few days ago, from the phone at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, I called to get permission to hike Turner’s land. The people at his Armendaris Ranch then faxed a form across the fifty miles of emptiness to where I waited for it at the opposite end of the huge ranch. A sketch of a bu√alo served as a logo at the top of the form. Most of the form was fairly standard, a legal detail making sure I understood that the ranch was not responsible if I met with an untimely accident, but one question gave me pause. Had I been to Europe in the past ninety days, it wanted to know. I stared blankly at it for a moment before I remembered why I was being asked. Turner is worried about the recent spread of mad-cow disease. He has reason to be, for he has seventeen hundred bison on the Jornada alone. ‘‘Bison on the Jornada? Ted Turner is crazy,’’ one rancher told me. I’ve also heard more than a few discouraging words around here 18 Elements concerning Jane Fonda. At the moment, she and Turner are in the middle of a well-publicized divorce. I take one last look at the bison and hop back in the van. I eye the sky nervously. The top of a thunderstorm ahead of me has been sheered o√ like an anvil. I drive further on a dusty road north along the steep wall of the Fra Cristobel Mountains. In a few miles I stop again near a small cluster of buildings where I see three men working. I step out of the van. The men are hovering over the back of a pickup truck stacked with wire cages. In each cage is a yellowish animal the size of a small cat. I talk to Bob Wu, who wears a floppy, shady hat. ‘‘They’re black-tailed prairie dogs,’’ he says. He and the others are part of a project that is reintroducing prairie dogs on Turner’s property. ‘‘We weigh them, measure them, tag them, and then take them back out and release them,’’ he says. Several other colonies have recently been established on the ranch. A hundred years ago the U.S. Biological Services initiated a campaign to eradicate prairie dogs from the American West in order to improve ranching prospects. Back then workers rode through the Jornada setting strychnine baits. The campaign succeeded. In one sizable Jornada colony alone, for example, 98 percent of the animals were killed in a single year. Now ranchers grumble about how Ted Turner is bringing them back. Some ranchers believe prairie dogs are competing for limited grassland. On the other hand, some recent studies suggest that since prairie dogs eat the shoots of shrubs like mesquite, they actually help keep shrubs from encroaching into grasslands . Other studies show that while the mammals increase the quality of the rangelands in the West, the quantity is often reduced. ‘‘But,’’ Bob Wu tells me, ‘‘it takes something like one hundred prairie dogs to consume the same biomass as a single Hereford.’’ He believes one way to maintain grasslands is to mix prairie dogs with bison. ‘‘Bison move on,’’ he says, ‘‘they don’t stay in one place and eat until it’s bare like cattle.’’ The prairie dog restoration has also attracted burrowing owls and other wildlife once common to the area. Although none of the three men are concerned about catching bubonic plague from the animals’ fleas, I’m less certain. As I turn to...

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