Wild Idea: Buffalo and Family in a Difficult Land

Twelve

217 Twelve O NE OF THE FIRST QUESTIONS PETER BINAS ASKED ME was a hard one: “What’s Wild Idea’s EBITA for the last couple quarters?” Luckily the question came in an email and I had time to look up the meaning of EBITA: Earnings Before Interest, Taxes And something else. Until that point in the life of Wild Idea Buffalo Company, Jill had been doing the books with the occasional help of an accountant; I was able to turn Peter’s questions over to them after I’d Googled the terms I did not understand. Jilian explained to me what metrics and dashboards were and tried to show me how to operate Peter’s spreadsheets. She had to install a new program on my computer before I could even open them. We tried to do what Peter asked us to do. “Just play with the inputs, and get a feel for how the business would operate under each configuration.” Jilian looked at me and laughed. “Jeeese, I’m just a sophomore. I don’t think my accounting professor could do this.” Jill understood Peter better than I did, but often, when she tried to explain it to me, we ended up in a fight. The tension between us rose as we tried to calculate the value of the business that we thought we already knew. Every night we talked about the future of Wild Idea and most nights we had trouble sleeping. We lay in bed, knowing that the other was not asleep yet afraid to say a word. By silent consent we took to listening to the BBC from midnight until five in the morning when we rose for work. The stories of child soldiers in Africa and the hopelessness of the Great Recession lulled us in and out of sleep. Our lives had changed even 218 P A R T F O U R before we closed the deal to sell a percentage of Wild Idea. Just trying to figure out what that share might be worth had put our whole world on edge. I know that I am being wheeled into an intensive care room at Rapid City Regional Hospital, but the morphine makes it feel like I am in the pasture where our buffalo spend the winter. Gervase is pointing at the top of a remote, eroding butte. He claims to have climbed up there the year before and that he found a few old planks and some rusty barbed wire. He says that someone lived up there in the “dirty thirties.” He chews at his cheek and squints to the grassy horizon from under his stained Stetson. “Used to be able to ride a horse up there,” he says. It’s easy to see that in another hundred years the butte top will be completely inaccessible above sheer cliffs. “They called him Crazy Johnson.” Gervase laughs and the landscape sucks up the sound. “Crazy tried raising peanuts up there before the weather drove him out.” “How long did he last?” I ask. He laughs again and looks at me like I am the crazy one. “Not very God-damned long,” he says. I am riding Camo, the same horse that landed me in the hospital. We are taking a last long swing through a thirty-five-square-mile pasture. We’re checking to see that all the summer cattle are out before we turn the buffalo in for the winter. I wonder if Crazy Johnson loved this difficult land the way we do or if he came to this spot by happenstance. Maybe the sandy soil reminded him of his childhood home in Tennessee or Georgia, where his family had raised peanuts. But how could he have thought that peanuts could survive in such a hostile landscape? Gervase and I hypothesize about how Crazy Johnson may have traveled to and from his homestead. He was likely too poor to own more than a single horse and there was no sign of a wagon road crawling along the ridges, so he either rode that single horse or walked. He probably didn’t go back and forth much. The closest town would have been Scenic, and that was fifteen miles away over rough country. 219 What was Crazy thinking about? What sort of dream would drive a man that far from civilization? The morphine dream takes me deeper into an area that is...