Wild Idea: Buffalo and Family in a Difficult Land

Nine

174 Nine W HEN YOU HAVE TO BUY A PIECE OF MACHINERY OR YOU want to send your little girl on her first international trip or away to college, it is wonderful to have a good-paying job. Though I didn’t want to leave home, I considered myself lucky as I streaked eastward through the upper reaches of the Pine Ridge Reservation, where the rate of unemployment hovers chronically at 80 percent. The snow petered out just as I crossed the White River and turned north to where I picked up Interstate 90, which took me four hundred miles east. The scattered ranches turned slowly to farms and the farms grew thicker until I got to Sioux Falls, the largest city in South Dakota. From there on the agriculture turned from a lifestyle to an industry; three hours later I was within the influence of the real city of Minneapolis, where the very idea of buffalo that thrived on nothing but grass, water, and distance had become so implausible that I was already homesick. I missed the last months of Jilian’s senior year of high school, but I returned with enough cash to pay for her trip to Australia. We took her to the airport in Rapid City, where she joined the rest of her basketball team. A prettier, greener group of eighteen-year-old girls never gathered at a United Airlines ticket counter. A few boyfriends had gotten off work to send the girls off and Cody Crawford was among them. I managed to be civil to Cody, but Jill could barely look at him. He had come in his welder’s clothes, was sporting a couple of days’ beard growth, and didn’t bother to wipe the tobacco juice away from 175 his lips when he kissed Jilian good-bye. Jill’s fingernails dug into my arm, and the barely audible noise she made reminded me of a cornered bull snake. It was a long ride home from the airport. I tried to tell Jill that this was a day we should celebrate. Jilian was off into the big, crazy world. She would be in Los Angeles in a few hours, then heading for Hawaii and finally an entirely new continent. “Her horizons are about to explode,” I said. “She’ll be off to college in the fall and then Katie-bar-the-door.” But Jill only stared straight ahead. “Come on. This is a time to be proud. Our little girl graduated with honors, she’s a hard worker, and she’s venturing off on her own.” “I hate that Cody Crawford.” “Oh, come on. You’re being an overly protective mom. Don’t you remember your first attraction to a guy like Cody?” I was driving but glanced over at Jill just as she turned to look at me. Her chin quivered. “Yeah,” she said. “I remember it perfectly.” Gervase, Jerry, Cliff, and Shane had been working in the Buffalo Girl, mostly on the reservation. They waited until I returned home to harvest buffalo from the Cheyenne River Ranch. While I was gone they had harvested only a handful of days. I had no idea how I was going to be able to keep our crew together with so little work to keep them busy. I figured that Gervase would stick with us for awhile no matter what, but for Jerry and Shane to come out to work for only a day or two a month, they had to take a day off their regular jobs, which I knew their employers were not happy about. Shane and Jerry each had a young family to provide for—in fact, they both had a couple of families to provide for—and I worried about the fallout from home in addition to what might happen at their jobs. Cliff was an old warhorse who was partially retired, but he worked with us because it gave him something worthwhile to do. “I’ve slaughtered enough animals in my life that I don’t need to slaughter any more,” Cliff told me. Then he winked. “But this is a little different. I’m going to stick around and see what happens here.” WhileIwasgone,thenumberofordersforourmeathadincreased. 176 P A R T T H R E E There was enough volume that Jill was thinking about hanging out a shingle in Rapid City. She joked that it was time that...