Wild Idea: Buffalo and Family in a Difficult Land

Seven

123 Seven T HE LAST OF THE BUFFALO WERE MOVED DOWN TO THE Cheyenne River Ranch in late May. Our plan was to graze them for the summer on the part of the ranch that we owned then move them to the National Grasslands—government permitted land—in the fall. We had two grazing permits—Indian Creek and Big Corral—and when we bought the ranch the permits were set up with the Forest Service to allow 273 mother beef cows and their calves to summer-graze at a fraction of the cost of a lease on privately owned land. The area was large enough to handle about 500 cow/ calf pairs and the neighbors had permits for the remaining 250 pairs. Because the other permit owners were nervous, albeit needlessly, about letting their cattle reside in the same pasture as our buffalo, I had asked for the Cheyenne River permits to be changed from allowing summer cattle to allowing winter buffalo. Some of the neighbors were not friendly and I suppose I understand why. Even though Jill and I had lived in the general area for our entire adult lives, we were new to the Cheyenne River drainage . Almost all the people within thirty miles had known each other since they were children. They had gone to school together, worked together, their kids played sports together, and they were all in the cattle business. To cattlemen, buffalo meant change and nobody likes the unknown. A neighbor at the Broken Heart Ranch who eventually became a good friend came over one morning in the mid-1980s, after I had been on the ranch for five years. He was a good Catholic man and 124 P A R T T H R E E he wanted to get something off his chest. “I wasn’t too sure about you,” he admitted. “I mean, you used those chicken hawks to hunt with and you were always messing with books. I figured it was some sort of a front. You know, witness protection program, maybe some sort of Russian spy keeping an eye on the missile silos around here.” Had I been able to speak just one sentence in Russian, that would have been the perfect time to try it out. He said he was sorry that he hadn’t been friendly to me from the start. He knew it was wrong and he had talked to his priest about it. “Father told me it was fear,” he said. “I’m done being scared.” “Of me?” “I guess I was,” he said. “But no more.” He put his prejudice against me behind him. He began to wave when we passed on the gravel roads. He asked questions that he had wondered about for years. And he changed the minds of others. I was hoping to find someone like that around the Cheyenne River Ranch, which was why Gervase and I jumped at the chance to go to the first branding we were invited to. There were lots of mounted cowboys and cowgirls, and there were plenty of old-timers like Gervase and me leaning on the corral rails as the cattle herd was gathered from the pasture. The important jobs of vaccinating, castrating, and branding were assigned to more familiar old guys, and by nine o’clock calves were being roped and drug in a steady stream toward the branding fires. Gervase and I did what we could to help, but these people were professionals. The job could have been accomplished with half the help, and it occurred to me that this branding event was as much a social occasion as it was a big job that needed communal help to accomplish. A group of serious cowboys were doing most of the work. From a short laconic man I learned that these neighbors had been moving from place to place, branding each other’s calves, for the past six weeks. It was easy to see that they were used to working together. Three riders rotated slowly into the pen of several hundred calves. In turn, the ropes would circle a cowboy hat a couple times and then snake out to catch a calf’s hind hocks. The other end of the 125 rope would be dallied around the saddle horn as the horse slowly turned with a nearly unperceivable touch of a leg and rein. Two “wrestlers” stepped out as the...