They said black plastic would do the trick. That it would look like a solid wall in front of them and they would clomp up the ramp and into the back of the truck. So there we were—my boys, my daughter and her boyfriend Rick—holding one of the rolls of plastic I had left over from mulching tomatoes back in the spring. We stretched it in front of us about chin-high, formed a circle, and slowly moved in around one of the females. Easy, slowly, hardly doing more than whispering to each other. She was scared, so she kept shuffling sideways like a huge crab or hopping up off her front legs like you sometimes see goats do. I tell you it took some nerve to keep the plastic steady.
She sure wasn’t moving up the ramp in any big hurry. I gave up hope that it would work. But I wasn’t prepared for the way it wouldn’t work. I thought she would just lean into the plastic wall until one of us lost nerve and got out of her way. I didn’t expect to hear her grunt a time or two and then leap like a bulky deer over Joni’s head. But that’s what she did, just as we had closed in to where she felt squeezed, I guess. And wouldn’t you know that she would pick the part of the wall held up by the shortest of us. She stretched herself and more or less glided over Joni, though her hind legs looked less straight than a deer’s look, still kind of crooked, and one of her hooves seemed almost to whack Joni in the head. My daughter let out a high screech, then the buffalo calf landed on the other side of the wall with a snort, then we heard her hooves pounding out a rapid beat. We dropped the plastic and watched her run toward the fence line where the other two were waiting, then the three of them leaped over the fence one at a time, even sort of stepping aside for each other, looking as pleased as can be. It was as though they were playing with us.
“Well, I guess that doesn’t work.” My son Chris was the first to speak, matter-of-factly and wryly, as usual. “Now what should we try?”
“I almost had a heart-attack!” Joni said. She started to laugh, then seemed to catch herself and lowered her head.
“It’s going to get dark,” I said. “Let’s try again tomorrow. We can think of something else in the meantime.” But I wasn’t looking forward to trying to get through another night.
It had taken us all day to get that one female surrounded. At first we stupidly marched our unrolled plastic into Shumacher’s pasture, thinking we could separate one of the three from the others, keep it cornered inside the black wall until Jason came with the truck, and then round them up like that one at a time. I don’t know why we thought three buffalo calves would stand still while five people staggered toward them holding up a five-foot-high black wall that flapped and buckled every time the slightest breeze kicked up. We must have looked like a cartoon version of a steam engine chugging across the prairie.
Even before that, though, we had to find out which neighbor’s fields the calves had invaded overnight, where they were planning to spend the day. I always hated Jason’s flying in that ultra-light of his, like a lawnmower with wings. And the son-of-a-gun even bought it from a guy in traction in the hospital, as though that wasn’t a hint that the thing wasn’t safe. But I admit it did come in handy a couple of mornings over the course of two weeks, because we would get up without knowing where the buffalo had wandered. Unless, that is, I got one of those frantic, angry calls from one of the few farmers left in northwestern New Jersey, one whose crops were getting eaten and trampled. And I kept dreading something worse, that we’d hear that they had gotten as far as the highway. Goodness me, I don’t know what we’d have done if those things had gotten down there. You wouldn’t want to hit one with your car, that’s for sure.
When the phone didn’t ring, though, Jason would start up his toy, using the flat part of the upper field as a runway, and circle around up there until he spotted them. And he had one of Rick’s walkie-talkies, another suburban plaything, something he said his dad got him back in his Boy Scout days. So on the day of the black-plastic folly, Jason called down to Joni’s boyfriend, though you could just barely make out what he was saying over the roar of the engine and all the interference. But we figured out that we had to get over to Shumacher’s pasture, we hoped before Shumacher knew what was going on. What frustration. Six of us could more or less keep them in one place if we surrounded the field, but when we formed our plastic train the calves would just skip over the fence into Shumacher’s soybeans, where they could do a lot more damage than in his pasture.
One thing we noticed, though, was that they always crossed into the soybeans at the same part of the fence. So, after we shooed them back into the pasture, we let them go for a while, until we moved the truck into position near that spot. Not right at the spot, though, but more into the pasture so we would have some room to maneuver around the fence line. As expected, they skipped across into the soybeans when the five of us positioned the truck and slid the ramp down. But Chris was crouching in the bean field, and when he stood up in front of those calves he created just enough confusion for us to surround the smaller female. The plan worked, except for the theory about black plastic. That was the idea of the people up at the County Game Farm and Petting Zoo. Seems it works with goats. Not with the American Bison, I can tell you.
*
“Andy, what kind ‘a fancy idee-uhs you gettin’ now?” That’s what George Harriman asked when he first saw us digging post holes and putting tar-wraps on the 4-by-4s we reinforced by nailing a 2-by-4 to each one. Not easy to explain to an old dairy farmer that ordering four buffalo calves made about as much sense as anything, especially since even Harriman had to sell off his cows, since almost all the family dairy farms in New Jersey had gone under in the last ten years or so. But Harriman didn’t get it. To be honest, I’m not sure I got it either. Sure, I did some reading on low-cholesterol buffalo meat, about the growing restaurant demand and projections for new markets in the near future. But I mostly thought about Indians when I thought about buffalo. Maybe it was all that Zane Grey I read when I was a boy in West New York.
“George, they’re beautiful animals, and they’re endangered. We almost killed them all off, you know… in the last century.”
“Well, sure, but what you plannin’ to do wid ‘em? You can’t exactly milk ‘em!” He was wearing the same faded green baseball cap he always wore. On the front you could barely make out the John Deere logo.
“The meat will bring a good price, and it’s very low cholesterol.” I still hadn’t thought about the whole butchering process and all, but I had to tell him something practical, so he wouldn’t think I was a complete fool.
“Andy, I don’t believe in cholesterol. Heck, I ain’t never thought about it in all these years. Still healthy as can be. You know there’s some won’t even eat butter?” He reached his right hand across under his left armpit and kept slowly scratching himself there, like he had been uncomfortable with something and was pleased he had found the trouble spot.
“You know, George, the Indians just followed the buffalo, that’s all they did. This one animal was the source of their food, their clothes, their tools, even their houses. It was everything they needed. And they cared a lot. It was sacred to them. Never killed more than they could use, and they didn’t waste a thing. They used the whole animal, even the bones. It was a whole way of life with them. Imagine living that simply, where one animal is everything you need.” He was bobbing his head up and down slowly, moving it horizontally at the same time. I realized he was counting fence posts while I was talking.
“How much they cost ya?” That was the side of Harriman it took me some time to get used to. He always wanted to know how much something cost. Doesn’t seem like a polite question to me, but he didn’t think that way.
“The posts?”
“Naw. The bufflo.”
I just laughed. “Well, Marie keeps reminding me we could instead be buying a new Cadillac!”
*
That conversation took place right before we got the news. And I never would have gone through with these plans if I’d known ahead of time about Marie. But you never know, I guess. This happens in every family, all over the world, but how are you supposed to get through it? How do you learn to accept it? And why did it happen to her first? I always thought I’d go before she did. I was older by ten years, and she’d never been sick a day in her life. And she left us so fast, about six weeks after the day we first heard about the cancer. Well, they said it had been in her system for a while. But I never got a chance to prepare. Maybe I wouldn’t have prepared no matter how long I had. We were still making plans, thinking about trips to take. Now we’ll never do those things…
Douglas keeps saying, “Mom’s with the Lord now, Dad.” I know that, I guess, but I want her with me. My middle son, Doug, has a lot of faith, and it does help to see him with such strong beliefs. I guess deep down I believe it all too, but at night I just keep thinking about everything—about those summers at the shore… those two trips we took to California in the station wagon that always smelled like dirty diapers… that time in Wyoming when we punctured the gas tank on one of my “short cuts” and they all camped under the trees along the road while I hitched a ride to find a junkyard… we were going to go to Ireland… and some of the holidays, good family days… Oh my God, what will the holidays be like this year… I can’t imagine… but what hurts worst is all those times I wasn’t my best, when I lost my temper, just because I came home tired, or the kids were misbehaving when they were little… and I blamed her. My God. And then to think about how much she suffered in those last days. I don’t know how she could be so quiet, why she didn’t complain more.
The nights are the worst.
the art is inside
