Prairie Winter Morning

Dave Bishop,
Winter of '99, Oran Township, Logan County

Call it happy hormones, a change in the weather or whatever, but today was really nice for me. Snow came in the night, just a small quiet weather patch that's settled in for a little while.

I made a pot of coffee and poured it into my old tin camp coffee pot, bundled that and my favorite big mug up in a towel and walked outside to enjoy.

The air was so clean and quiet, I could hear the snowflakes creak and snuggle down on the dry grass. I brushed out a hollow on some bales of bluestem hay and just sat there in the peace.

There are some days out here in the country when my senses seem so alive, sounds and smells and textures rush together and fill me so completely that I can't say where I end and they begin. We all become one, the season and the land and me.

I had the best of both worlds today. I could lean back into the bales, and catch summer's fragrance deep down in those bundles of prairie. They smelled like warm earth, like sage and wood and sunlight. I could climb up from the hollow and taste the winter air, then wash it down with a swallow from my cup. I took pleasure in the steam that would rise from the pot when I would unwrap it from the towel, the cup felt good and hefty when I wrapped my hand around it, even the clank of the pot against the clay cup rim and the sound of the liquid were satisfying. I make good coffee, too... strong and dark and rich.

I knew it wouldn't be long before the dogs would come back from the frozen creek, circling round my feet, taking joy in the feel of the cold against their winter undercoats. The quiet would be gone then, and the spell of winter peace broken on the way to more practical matters - time to stoke the wood stove, scatter seed to the birds and lay out hay for the horses. But I'm content with that, I took that moment and bundled it inside me, to keep us both safe - the memory and me.

- coyotegal, on December 30, 2001

The Bison

It gets pretty hair-raising with the bison, they are even more dangerous than the cattle (longhorn) that we also have to round up and auction.
The longhorn, even though they are free-ranged, have some sense of domestication in their ancestry, and they take much easier to the manipulations. Plus they're built with those wide (comparatively) butts and though they can be wily, they've basically got beef fat for brains - makes it harder for them to figure out what we humans are about to do.
Bison, on the other hand, still have their wild intelligence and grace. I don't know if you've had the privilege of seeing them in action, but's it's an amazing thing to witness. Some people might think they're big and dumb and slow, and that would be a mistake. Their strength is hard to imagine, they can run upwards of 35 mph, and they can turn on a dime- thanks to their small (comparatively) butts. One of our employees calls them "Nature's zero-turning-radius lawnmowers".
When I see them out away from the crowds, and at play, they remind me of antelope somehow - pronging and whirling, sort of like the way the wind plays along the contours of the land out here. Maybe that's part of what they're about... wind shapes the prairie in a lot of ways.
When I see them surrounded by the tourists, laughing and pointing at their panic, it's hard to take. I sometimes imagine I see in those big liquid eyes the whole history of their struggle - the hunts, the massive waste, all of it. And somehow I'm filled with shame.
- coyotegal, on January 1, 2002