The Wild Taste of the Wild West

Diary of a journey through a landscape whose unchanging originality depends, to a large extent, on injections of chemical fertilizer and herbicides. What to do?

October 5 2005. Outside on the porch Dan O'Brien flips the burgers over on the gas barbeque with practiced ease and just a couple of minutes later the bald rancher and writer drops one of them onto my plate next to the potatoes with a look of deep satisfaction behind his round metal rimmed glasses. Though it seems to be a rerun of a great American cliché, something's very different this time. The reason I came to O'Brien's Cheyenne River Ranch a good hour's drive Southeast of Rapid City, South Dakota, is that he's the buffalo guru of the West. Nobody is more closely identified with the revival of the buffalo, or American bison, than he is. I take a bite of the buffalo burger and suddenly my nervous system's overloaded by all the signals pouring in. I can't put names to the countless nuances of flavour, bur I know I'm tasting the land of the Lakota Sioux, of Crazy Horse, Red Cloud and Sitting Bull. What does it mean for our very different world today though.

This morning O'Brien showed me the winder pasture for his 450 buffalo, a square expanse of hills that look like frozen waves eight miles along each side. The ground was barely covered by short native brown grasses, mostly bluestem. "We never give the heard any additional feed, but between now and December they'll each gain up to three pounds in weight per day," he explained, "most ranchers give buffalo winter feed and fatten them up like cattle before slaughter. It doesn't work though, because the meat doesn't get a marbling of fat like beef does." I scanned the wide expanse, but could see no buildings of any kind and only few cottonwood trees down in the draws. It's one of the roughest pieces of land I've ever seen, but the use permit O'Brien has on the piece of the Buffalo Gap National Grassland is one of the most valuable possessions; without it Wild Idea would have remained just that.

October 6 2005. There's the crack of a shot up ahead, but none of the brown swathe of buffalo a hundred yards in front of me moves a muscle. There clearly not going to be a Hollywood-style stampede. Then comes the second shot and very slowly the great beast with 450 bodies stirs then turns to my right. Our pick-up moves cautiously forward as the heard moves off and suddenly there is a shaggy one-ton bull with a twisted horn turning away from us. "There's Curly Bill!" says O'Brien's wife, the chef Jill Maguire, "He's a fancy fellow!" In O'Brien's book, Buffalo for the Broken Heart, I'd read how Curly Bill was one of the first buffalo he purchased back in 1998 and set in motion his metamorphosis from a cattle rancher into a buffalo guru.

The pick-up stops, we jump out and there are two second-year buffalo looking as peaceful as if they'd just lain themselves down, but with the blood draining from cuts in their necks. A vet is taking samples of the blood to check for disease, whilst O'Brien, his partner ex-university of South Dakota literature professor Gervaise Hittle and his right hand man Erney, are busy with a tractor and chains to load them onto the back of one of the pick-ups for transportation to the slaughterhouse. Last night Hittle told me how Wild Idea insists upon this type of "kill" instead of the conventional path of separating animals from the herd and trucking them to a slaughterhouse where the smell of death would pump them full of adrenalin if that hadn't already happened. This way their blood returns to the soil and America is beginning to wake up to the real taste of this land that is the source of its primary myth of national identity.

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