This Land by Christopher Ketcham

Author:Christopher Ketcham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

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Years ago, during the spring migration of the bison, I camped next to the Madison River at the western edge of Yellowstone National Park. One morning I awoke to a smell of upturned earth and wet fur, a lavish animal stench, and in my half sleep I perceived what seemed to be a wall blocking the sky that hadn’t been there when I went to bed. I unzipped the tent and was up against 2,000 pounds of living flesh, an adult bison no more than three feet from my nose, gently ignoring me as it nibbled on the grass. Its great godlike towering head, dreadlocked with mud, swayed softly with the motion of its eating.

“Hey, bud,” I said.

I was terrified and awed and absolutely still. Then I became aware in the quiet of the forest that all around me was a pleased grunting and snorting, the sound of many mouths chewing, many hooves pawing and prodding about. A herd had surrounded the campsite. It moved on quickly, and when it passed beyond the narrow vision afforded from the tent, I stumbled into the light in my underwear, curious as a child, one-eyed with sleep, following the animals through a forest of willows to the edge of the river. The young mothers kept close their amber-colored calves, who were tufted as sheep. They passed last in single file into the willows. There were fifty or so bison, mothers and bulls and calves, and there was power and grace and terribleness in their crossing of the water, which seemed to part for them.

From the bank of the river, as the herd was crossing, I waded out. One of the bulls at the far bank snorted at me, looking up with locked eyes that said, You’re some kind of dumb thing truly. A mature bull can weigh 2,500 pounds, broad-jump fifteen feet, run forty miles an hour. Bison bison, with the grizzly bear, is the last of the megafauna in North America, a pygmy vestige bovid of the Pleistocene, when the mastodons and mammoths dwarfed them. Buffalo gore tourists in growing numbers every year, because there are too many tourists with too many cameras who want selfies with them. At the suggestion of this glowering bull I sat down in the flow of the river, for if a buffalo signals he will attack, you must lie down, lie down low, and bow. I spent a week watching the buffalo during that May long ago, in 2007, the herds edging their way out of the park, roaming as they should and must, waking me with the delicateness of their passage, and astonishing me with the speed of their disappearances. They moved like fog.

The Yellowstone bison population is an extraordinary example of the preservation of a species that might have been lost. The holocaust of the nineteenth century—which, I repeat for the horror of it, was probably the single largest slaughter of species biomass in recorded history—left a straggling terminal wild bunch that

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