Buffalo for Broken Heart

CHAPTER 1 I've heard that when people in cities have a tough week at workwhen it looks like they might lose their jobs or they've made some decision that threatens to ruin their livesthey 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 weO'Brien, Dan is the author of 'Buffalo for Broken Heart' with ISBN 9780375503252 and ISBN 0375503250.