The cautionary bison tale I promised Danita as she heads for Custer State Park for Memorial Day Weekend. Excerpted from "Ribbons of Highway" --


We made our way slowly out of Yellowstone, drinking in the powerful beauty of this immense wild place, and headed for the Northeast Entrance, which would deliver us into Montana. As we drove through Lamar Valley, site of the National Park Service’s Buffalo Ranch, we saw large herds of bison, and one small herd of nine ladies from Denver who were about to embark on a five-day pack trip across the valley. The ladies, experienced riders all, had one fear: buffalo. They should have been underway already, but something literally sat in their way. I talked to the woman who’d lassoed her friends into this trip. (She’d heard about the pack tours "at the Future Farmers of America convention.") She sat on her horse, ready to ride into the wilderness, but was afraid of just one thing: "The buffalo sittin’ straight out there."

Smart to be scared. Mike and Dana had taken a trail ride from the stables near Mammoth Hot Springs and had talked a lot about the viciousness of bison and the stupidity of tourists with Justin and Erin, their wrangler and wrangler-in-training. Bison were the only animals Justin was afraid of. Every morning before starting the day’s rides, the stable sends scouts onto the trails to look for buffalo. Justin talked about the tourists who die every year from bison attacks. When we drove into Yellowstone, the ranger who checked my Golden Eagle Passport had handed us a flyer. It said to keep away from the bison, and told of the non-heeders gored and killed each year. One man tried to put his three-year-old daughter atop a buffalo for a photo. The man is dead. From Yellowstone on into Custer State Park in South Dakota, we’d see people, out of their cars, cameras poised, walking close to these wild, horned behemoths, cooing to them as if they were puppies.

As we rode through this wild country, I noticed that the middle finger of my left hand, which takes most of the steering wheel pressure, was completely callused. My trophy for nearly 8,000 miles of driving.
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