A Buffalo in the House: The Extraordinary Story of Charlie and His Family - Softcover

Rosen, R. D.

 
9780812978889: A Buffalo in the House: The Extraordinary Story of Charlie and His Family
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812978889 ISBN 13: 9780812978889
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

A buffalo in the house? Yes, a buffalo. More than a hundred years after her pioneer ancestors hand-raised two baby buffalo to help rescue the species from the brink of extinction, Veryl Goodnight and her husband, Roger Brooks, commit themselves to saving just one. When they welcome an orphaned baby buffalo into their Santa Fe home, they expect him to stay just until he’s old enough to rejoin a herd.

But Charlie becomes a big part of their family life–about two pounds bigger every day.

Surrounded by people and dogs, Charlie has no idea he’s a buffalo–and Roger has no idea how strong the bond between a middle-aged man and a buffalo can be. When Charlie’s eventual introduction to a herd results in a terrible accident, Charlie’s courage and Roger and Veryl’s devotion are pushed to their limits.

Contrasting the nineteenth-century killing of tens of millions of buffalo against our own environmental consciousness, this book asks the question: How far are you willing to go for an animal you love? A love story, a comedy, and a history of the American West, A Buffalo in the House packs a major emotional wallop and will be hard to forget.

“More than a touching man-beast buddy tale . . . Rosen lovingly chronicles the history of an embattled species and its importance in the American West.”
–Entertainment Weekly

“Riveting . . . From the story of one stray baby bison named Charlie . . . and the family that took him in, Rosen has drawn a sweeping history of the American frontier. . . . I can’t remember when I’ve been instructed so gracefully, or entertained to such deep purpose.”
–Jane Kramer, The New Yorker

“Powerful . . . [Charlie is] one of the most memorable characters in recent nature writing.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Moving proof of the restorative powers of man’s relationship with nature.”
–People

“If you’re mad for Marley, elated over Elsa the lion, [or] rowdy for Rascal . . . stampede out and get A Buffalo in the House.”
–Huron Daily Tribune

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

R. D. Rosen is the Edgar Award-winning author of Strike Three You’re Dead and other Harvey Blissberg mysteries, as well as several nonfiction books.

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Chapter One

Veryl Goodnight held the receiver against her ear with a shrugged shoulder while she wiped the clay off her hands with a rag. She was a well-known sculptor in bronze of animals, frontier women, and other Western subjects—and a beautiful, young-looking woman in her fifties with a soft, sibilant voice.

“It’s Marlo Goble. How are you today?”

Veryl Goodnight’s heart jumped. Dr. Marlo Goble was a famous orthopedic surgeon with many medical patents to his credit, and a collector of Veryl’s art as well. But at the moment his key credential was that he owned the Medicine Lodge Buffalo Ranch in Idaho, just west of Yellowstone National Park. It was traditional buffalo country and the site of one of the most famous buffalo jumps, where, for thousands of years, the Plains Indians had hunted buffalo en masse by stampeding them off a bluff.

“I’m okay,” Veryl said. “How are you?”

“Oh, I’m just fine. How’s Roger?”

“Just fine. He’s out in the barn with the horses.” She glanced out the window of the studio with its Spanish tile floor and high ceiling. Beyond the barn, even though it was May in Santa Fe, there were still a few dollops of winter snow left on the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

“Good, good. I’m calling because I’ve got a two-day-old bison calf here who needs a mother. The lady postman found him yesterday wandering down by the fence on my property.”

Finally, she thought. With birthing season almost over, she had just about given up hope. It had been three months since Veryl had written letters to five buffalo ranchers in the West, men who knew her and her work, asking them to let her know if and when they had a “bottle baby”—an orphaned buffalo who needed a temporary human home. Unlike genetically compromised, bred-to-be-docile cattle, mature buffalo cows were extremely self-sufficient, rarely died in childbirth, and even more rarely abandoned their young.

“What happened to the mother?” she asked, her eyes gliding over the sculpture of three wolves she was working on. Something wasn’t right. Like any artist, she saw hundreds of flaws where a bystander would see only the miracle of an animal come to life in clay.

“I’ll bet my cowboys were moving the herd to another pasture and they didn’t notice that one of the cows had given birth. The little guy must’ve gotten left behind. By the time we found him, the herd was already miles away. It’s a shame, but the good news is that he got a day of nursing in. That’ll stand him in good stead. You’re welcome to come up and take him home for a while.”

“Well, sure,” Veryl said. “Absolutely. Let me find out when Roger can fly us up.”

“Veryl,” Marlo said, “this one’s a fighter, but I can’t guarantee you he’s going to make it.”

“I know,” she replied, although she didn’t know. It had never occurred to her that she might get a baby buffalo who wouldn’t survive.

“First thing you need to do is go out and load up on powdered goat’s milk, ’cause this little guy can sure suck the heck out of a half- gallon bottle. But, with any luck, at least now you can start that piece of yours.”

“That piece” was a sculpture of a nineteenth-century rancher’s wife bottle-feeding a couple of baby buffalo. Not just any rancher’s wife, and not just any rancher either. Her name was Mary Ann Dyer and she had married a great-great uncle of Veryl’s named Charles Goodnight. Veryl had known for years about her ancestor’s illustrious career as a pioneering cattle rancher in the Texas panhandle. Goodnight was the subject of biographies, a stern but just presence in countless books on the American frontier. However, it wasn’t until the past December, when a friend mailed her an article from Texas Highways magazine, that Veryl had learned that Charles and Mary Ann Goodnight had done something quite extraordinary: they had helped save the American buffalo from total annihilation in the 1870s. Veryl almost immediately decided to immortalize in bronze what Charles and Mary Ann had done for all buffalo. To do that, she needed a buffalo calf, and a very, very young one at that.

She worked almost exclusively from life. For the trio of wolves she was finishing now, she had made three or four trips to the Candy Kitchen Wolf Refuge near the Zuni pueblo in southwestern New Mexico, where she had observed full-blooded wolves that had been rescued, in many cases, from humans who erroneously thought that they might make nice pets. The wolves were the most difficult subjects she’d ever undertaken. They looked so much like dogs that it was hard to capture their “wolfness.” Making a wolf that looked like a dog was easy; making a wolf that looked like a wolf was not. Veryl looked over at Mickey, their Jack Russell terrier puppy, who was lying uncharacteristically still on a rug, snoozing in a patch of sunlight next to Luke, their German shepherd. Except for the occasional twitching leg, neither of them had moved a muscle in over an hour. A statue of sleeping dogs, Veryl thought—now that would be a piece of cake.

As for a buffalo calf, she knew he would be able to model for her right in her studio, as long as it was bottle-nursing, so she could symbolize the remarkable moment in American history when a few humans had nursed a species back from the brink of extinction.

Veryl walked down to the barn, where Roger was feeding his horse Kepler, who shared the barn with Matt Dillon, his other horse, and Veryl’s horse Toddy. As she watched him from outside the stall, she thought, even after thirteen years of marriage: how lucky can one girl be?

Roger, retired now for several years as a commercial airline pilot, was a handsome, big-boned man, over six feet, thick as a linebacker, with a lightly freckled face red from the sun and a boyish head of graying blond hair. No one would be surprised to learn that he had once flown secret missions in Laos for the CIA, or had a first-degree black belt in karate, or still played competitive soccer. He looked like just the sort of man you’d want by your side in a war or mudslide or barroom brawl. He was exactly the kind of airline pilot you were glad to see smiling by the cockpit door as you boarded his plane.

Roger had a wry sense of humor that he indulged on rare occasions. His particular mix of openness and reserve made him entirely familiar and unknowable at the same time. When he confided in you, you were only more aware of what he wasn’t telling you.

Roger had a gift for reading people quickly and could usually figure out within a few sentences who was capable of a real exchange of ideas and who just wanted to hear himself talk. As a result, he rarely found himself in a conversation he didn’t want to be in, which saved him a lot of words. He knew how to turn aside insipid salesmen and ranting strangers with a smile. Roger hadn’t married until his forties, back in the late 1980s. He was waiting for the right woman to come along. She turned out to be Veryl Goodnight, then in her late thirties, who had obviously been waiting for the right man.

“Guess what?” she asked, beaming.

Roger turned from Kepler and sized up her excitement. “You got a baby bison?” It was just like him, one step ahead of everyone else.

“Marlo Goble just called. The calf’s only a couple of days old and Marlo wants us to come up and get him.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Roger...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812978889
ISBN 13 
9780812978889
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
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