The Longest Road by Philip Caputo

Author:Philip Caputo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company

23.

Alex invited us over for coffee—French-press coffee with cardamom, no less—and Dani performed with impressive dexterity, twirling a hoop around each shoulder, another around her waist, and a fourth around her knees, all at the same time. We felt a bit of a letdown when she and her brother left, bound for Oregon.

I was still set on photographing wild bison. Long ago, Lakota shamans went on vision quests, imploring Wakan Tanka to show them where the herds were. Having bonded with a shaman the night before, I hoped that some of his magic would rub off on me. My vision—a guess, really—was that we’d better our chances of spotting buffalo in the Badlands Wilderness Area, a more primitive part of the national park offering escape from crowds and signed trails.

We banged along the gravel Sage Creek rim road, parked, then hiked a sloping ridge down into a basin riven by wooded creeks, overlooked by far-off buttes and mesas, and webbed with buffalo trails as easy to follow as the man-made kind. Cholla sprouted yellow summer blossoms, mallow scattered orange across the sweep of bluestem and cordgrass. I loved it, two people alone in a vast and beautiful desolation, walking in the tracks of wild buffalo.

But after tramping more than an hour, we hadn’t seen a single animal. My foot was throbbing again, even though we’d covered less than three miles. We sat down by a pond, in a tallgrass meadow half hidden by cottonwood and more willow. Only us and swallows and ducks and jack-in-the-box prairie dogs and trees, sibilant in the warm wind. All quite magical. I took off my shirt, Leslie removed hers; I shed my jeans, she wriggled out of hers, and … Rocks began poking in uncomfortable places, the bugs found us while fleeing predatory swallows, and the luxuriant grass looked like ideal tick habitat. Realizing that this was not a Cialis commercial, we looked at each other, started laughing, got dressed, and headed back.

There were three of them about 250 yards away, two grazing, one lying in the shade of a solitary tree. I pulled the camera out of my backpack and began a stalk, crouching at first, then crawling on hands and knees. When I’d closed to within fifty yards, I raised my binoculars and was awed by their size. Each bull, weighing close to a ton, looked like he could take on Fred and win, humped shoulders mantled in a knotty brown cape, hindquarters the color of burned wood, horns burnished by sunlight hooking out from a shaggy head as big as a Volkswagen’s front end, dripping a beard and perforated by tiny black eyes.

I was too close for safety and too far for a good shot—I didn’t have a long lens. I dropped into a shallow ravine, slithered up the side to the lip, and realized that the ravine would bring me to within thirty yards. Thirty miles an hour, the warnings on the back of the map said. How long would

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