Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch - Softcover

O'Brien, Dan

 
9780375761393: Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch
Softcover
ISBN 10: 037576139X ISBN 13: 9780375761393
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

For twenty years Dan O’Brien struggled to make ends meet on his cattle ranch in South Dakota. But when a neighbor invited him to lend a hand at the annual buffalo roundup, O’Brien was inspired to convert his own ranch, the Broken Heart, to buffalo. Starting with thirteen calves, “short-necked, golden balls of wool,” O’Brien embarked on a journey that returned buffalo to his land for the first time in more than a century and a half.

Buffalo for the Broken Heart is at once a tender account of the buffaloes’ first seasons on the ranch and an engaging lesson in wildlife ecology. Whether he’s describing the grazing pattern of the buffalo, the thrill of watching a falcon home in on its prey, or the comical spectacle of a buffalo bull wallowing in the mud, O’Brien combines a novelist’s eye for detail with a naturalist’s understanding to create an enriching, entertaining narrative.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dan O'Brien, a writer and buffalo rancher, is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction about the West. He has worked as an endangered-species biologist and an English teacher. He lives in Whitewood, South Dakota.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

For twenty years Dan O'Brien struggled to make ends meet on his cattle ranch in South Dakota. But when a neighbor invited him to lend a hand at the annual buffalo roundup, O'Brien was inspired to convert his own ranch, the Broken Heart, to buffalo. Starting with thirteen calves, "short-necked, golden balls of wool," O'Brien embarked on a journey that returned buffalo to his land for the first time in more than a century and a half.
Buffalo for the Broken Heart is at once a tender account of the buffaloes' first seasons on the ranch and an engaging lesson in wildlife ecology. Whether he's describing the grazing pattern of the buffalo, the thrill of watching a falcon home in on its prey, or the comical spectacle of a buffalo bull wallowing in the mud, O'Brien combines a novelist's eye for detail with a naturalist's understanding to create an enriching, entertaining narrative.

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CHAPTER 1

I’ve heard that when people in cities have a tough week at work—when it looks like they might lose their jobs or they’ve made some decision that threatens to ruin their lives—they sometimes wander the city. I’ve heard they sit in movie theaters all afternoon, watching the same movie over and over. They walk the open parks or stand on the wharves, staring at ships moving out to sea. The closest movie theater to me is forty miles away, and the ocean is another eighteen hundred miles east. But I’m surrounded by a million acres of open country, and when my world seems to be coming apart, I climb into my pickup and drive.

Trying to make a life as a cattle rancher in the economy of the Great Plains makes for a lot of driving, and one late afternoon a dozen Septembers ago it led me to a remote dirt road along the southern boundary of Badlands National Monument. I was thinking about the mortgage payment that would be coming due in October, and the recent, inexplicable dip in cattle prices that would cut my income in half. I drove too fast, and when I came over a dusty rise I nearly ran into an enormous bull buffalo.

He reclined luxuriously in the center of the dirt road, stretched out in the sun like a two-thousand-pound tomcat. With the exception of a whale I’d once caught a glimpse of, this was the biggest living thing I had ever seen. By the time I’d braked, I’d gotten way too close and was struggling to get the gear shift into reverse when he raised his head and looked straight into my eyes. I was close enough to see the grill of my pickup reflected in his round, dark eyes under a mop of dark, curly hair. His head was the size of a dishwasher.

I managed to get the pickup into reverse but, like the wedding guest caught in the stare of the Ancient Mariner, I was frozen in place. We stared at each other for perhaps a minute, and for that minute all my business worries were dwarfed by this dose of reality lying in the road ahead. I focused on one of his eyelashes, long and expressive, as it batted away a yellow butterfly. Leisurely, the head dipped and the legs pulled under the great beast. The short, paintbrush tail whipped in the dust and the bull rocked once, twice, and up onto his feet. He shook like a dog, creating a cloud of dry South Dakota soil that drifted away on the cooling evening breeze. Then he slowly raised the tiny, black hoof of his left rear foot, stretched his head out, and, as if the hoof were a ballet slipper, scratched his neck below the long woolly goatee. He took one last look at me before he moved off the road, into a nearby draw and out of sight.

Even then I sensed that that buffalo signalled something profound, but like the harried city-dweller drawn to ships moving on the ocean, I shook my head, unable to find the link between that dusty old bull and myself. I slipped the transmission into gear and immediately found myself back in the complexities of life. My anxiety had to do with trying to sustain myself in the unpredictable meteorological and economic climate of the northern plains that I am cursed to love.

On the Great Plains the business of sustaining oneself usually ends up having something to do with agriculture, and agriculture usually means cattle grazing. The problem is that cattle grazing is not subject to generally accepted business practices. For example: once every year or so I used to get into a cattle deal together with my neighbor to the south. We’d buy some yearlings and try to put some weight on them for resale, or we’d get some old cows that were about ready to give birth and try to make a buck on the calves. Like everyone, we’d do our best to buy when the market was low and sell when it was high, and give the cattle good care that would turn our expenses into profit. But our plans almost never worked out and we resigned ourselves to the fact that capitalist enterprise on the Great Plains has its own set of rules. After a while, when we made a decision to try one of these schemes, my neighbor would sigh and say, “I sure hope we break even on this deal. I need the money.”

In the mid-1980s the cost of fuel, interest rates, and cattle prices all soared. The economy was racing along a rosy highway until, for no apparent reason, cattle prices suddenly stalled, then fell. Everyone who owned a cow hit the windshield of that speeding economy, and the result was damage to the land, our dreams, and our self- esteem. The money we were certain we’d make on the cows—money that was to go to make the mortgage payments—vaporized. To paraphrase a popular joke: What’s the last thing that goes through a cowboy’s mind when he hits the windshield of a speeding economy? His ass.

In some ways, I was luckier than most. Being in good health, and educated to make a living with books, I didn’t have to settle for a job in a gas station or a bar. The catch is that there are no jobs for people like me on the Great Plains, so I had to put the ranch in the care of a neighbor while I “worked out,” chasing jobs as an endangered-species biologist, or as an English teacher on the West Coast and in Colorado. I hated leaving the ranch, because by then, at thirty-nine, I had become addicted to watching the cycles of life on that certain little patch of prairie. But even if I had wanted to get away, I am a middle-class, middle-American kid, and I thought I had to find some way to make the land payments. It never occurred to me to tell the bank to stick the mortgage in their ear and, following in the footsteps of Dust Bowl refugees, go to California and “work out” for the rest of my life.

Walking away from the mortgage would have been tough for me, but walking away from the land was impossible. Ever since a 1950s family trip to the West, crammed between two brothers in the backseat of a ’55 Chevy station wagon dragging a fold-up camper, I had dreamed of living on the edge of the Black Hills. When we wound our way down from the tourist town of Deadwood and found the prairie stretching north for a thousand miles into Canada, I turned to my mother and said, “There. Right there, where the land begins to flatten out and the trees disappear. That’s where I want to live.”

It was a landscape so different from the tire factories, hardwood forests, and deep, black-soil farms of northwestern Ohio, where I was growing up, that my mother laughed. She reached over the back of the seat and patted my shoulder. “Don’t be silly,” she said, “it’s just a big, empty land”—a tiny condescension I have received from outsiders a thousand times since.

My first vision of the northern Great Plains was a romantic little kid’s dream of cowboys, horses, and big sunsets. But it stuck with me. Now, no matter where I am, I can still close my eyes and see that sight from the north slope of the Black Hills: grass swaying in the wind to infinity and a sky that takes up half the world. It is the vision that has set the direction for my life.

It’s taken me a long time to come to grips with the reality of life on the Great Plains, though it shouldn’t have. Twenty years after that first look, I took over one of the little ranches north of the Black Hills, and even before I signed the papers that gave me the right to start making payments on the place, I was aware that a previous owner had hung himself in the barn.

I don’t know why this suicide happened, but I can imagine. I assumed a bad government-guaranteed Farmers Home Administration loan from the dead man’s son. He’d never made a payment but had repaired some fence and tried to remodel the house. The main building had been a grain bin for a generation and I’m sure he had a dream...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
037576139X
ISBN 13 
9780375761393
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

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