Beaded Buffalo

“We need another and a wiser, and perhaps a more mystic concept of animals… In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and confident, gifted with…senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.”
~ Henry Beston, “The Outermost House,“ 1928

There’s a razor-sharp line between naiveté and idiocy, and on a splendid autumn day in Yellowstone National Park, I watched a man precariously straddle that line.

It was early October and my wife and I were in the midst of a two-month swing through the Rockies. We’d pulled into a virtually empty Yellowstone, the windshield tourists having been chased home by early-season snowfall. A bull elk with harem ambled through a deserted car campground, bald eagles glided overhead, and buffalo nibbled on the browning grass. It was soul-soothing bliss.

The burgers weren’t bad, either. After far too many meals of instant bloatmeal and mac ’n’ cheese, we’d stopped at Grant Village to replenish camping staples and dine on real food while plotting our route. As we sat at a splintered picnic table, enjoying the bluebird sky and an unseasonably warm day, I noticed a huge, magnificently solitary bison bull off in the distance.

So did some passersby, because a sedan came to an almost-screeching halt on the far side of the buffalo. Out poured a family, jumping around like fleas on a hotplate, consumed with the unfettered excitement you often see in a place so steeped in natural wonders and wildlife.

A large camera rose to mother’s eye two or three times, then she pointed to the horned beast. Father, without hesitation, grabbed a small boy from the cluster of kids. As mother fumbled with the camera, dad marched briskly toward the bison, carrying the lad stiff-armed, as if the youngster had just soiled himself. Here was a family in search of the ultimate souvenir: a picture of Little Whozit astride the symbol of the Great American Frontier.

While buffalo look tame, like big ol’, lazy, shaggy dogs, they are notoriously edgy brutes that don’t like being treated as if they’re amusement-park rides. And they have those sharp, pointy horns on either side of their bulldozer-like heads, which they occasionally use to express their displeasure.

I dropped my burger and ran toward the man, frantically waving my arms and yelling for him to stop. Luckily, he did. He then mumbled something in a foreign tongue, looked at me in disgust, and huffed his way back to the car while dragging the boy by the hand.

The following summer, another European, also apparently bent on getting a great vacation photo, was about 6 feet from a similarly solitary bull when it charged. Alain Jean-Jacques Dumont, 21, of Toulouse, France, died after being gored and tossed 10 feet in the air. Yellowstone’s first and only other bison-related death occurred under similar circumstances. Marvin Schrader, his wife, and their three children were near Old Faithful when they spotted a lone bull in a meadow. Schrader was about 20 feet from the buffalo, taking photos, when the animal charged. The man was gored and tossed 12 feet. His wife, who had in her possession one of the park’s red Danger pamphlets that warned about wild animals, later admitted they’d been too close.

In Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park, author and Yellowstone Historical Archivist Lee Whittlesey relates a bit of pithy advice that he attributes to a coworker: “Get a clue, people. These animals are not tame.” That from a 14-year-veteran tour guide who one day watched a buffalo toss a 70-year old New Jersey man into the air, luckily injuring only his leg.

Why do such foolish and highly preventable incidents occur? Whittlesey offers an insightful anecdote. When a park visitor was warned he was too close to a buffalo, the tourist was heard to casually reply, “Oh, they’re a lot tamer than [park officials] tell you they are.”

While some people believe animals are a resource put on earth to be used by humans — hunters and farmers mostly — there are those at the other end of the spectrum who view beasts as cute and pet-like. To these people, wild animals fill an emotional need, and are gentle and nonthreatening. Social scientists label this the “Bambi syndrome,” and it confounds Whittlesey. “It never ceases to amaze me that some people can’t grasp the simple truth that animals can hurt them.”

Another eyebrow-raising example: “While rangering at the Mammoth Visitor Center one summer,” relates Whittlesey, “I was approached by a man with a wild look in his eyes. ‘These animals running around out here…they couldn’t be wild, could they, or you wouldn’t just have them running around loose?’ I gave the standard warning speech, trying to be patient and not laugh or be horrified.”

The sighting of a wild beast in its natural environs is an eye-popping experience that elicits powerful emotions. Some theorists say it stirs a wildness deep within us that’s usually well hidden by civilization, a part of our animal nature we thought we shed when we evolved into a modern society. Whatever the reason, an encounter with a wilderness critter can be a life-altering moment. (To this day, my heart races when I think about the first time I heard a bear snuffling around outside my tent.)

Yellowstone isn’t the only park where human-animal confrontations occur, nor are bison the only beasts involved. There are documented incidents of moose, coyotes and elk injuring park visitors throughout North America. (I once watched a well-racked bull elk larger than a minivan try to shish-kebab a Lycra-clad, middle-aged, camera-clutching woman in Canada’s Banff National Park.) The culprit is always a lack of common sense on the part of the two-leggeds.

We’d be better off, as would the animals, if all park attendees adopted the philosophy of English author Henry Beston, who in 1928 wrote in The Outermost House: “We need another and a wiser, and perhaps a more mystic concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of his own knowledge, and sees…the whole image distorted. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we greatly err, for the animals shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and confident, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings. They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the heat of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

So when sharing the terrain of those “other nations,” hold the great beasts in esteem and high respect, and pause to teach your fellow travelers who don’t. Always remember that you’re in the realm of wild animals (that’s why there’s no such word as tamelife), which have the right to exist free of human interference.

And adhere strictly to Whittlesey’s simple code of the woods: Never approach any animal — even small ones — because they are all potentially dangerous. “We humans are only temporary visitors,” he says. “This is the animals’ home. Give them a break, and give yourself one in the process.”

A variation of this article appeared in Backpacker Magazine.