It finally rained.

For the past few years the wind would freshen in that magic way and our spirits would boil and swell like the thunderheads over the Black Hills. But time and again what had promised to be a reprieve from the oppressive, stomach-churning drought would evaporate into the heavens and leave nothing but clear sky and hot dry wind.

When you build a fence around buffalo, no matter how big the pasture, there is something human in most of us that takes on the responsibility for all that resides within. A case of over-developed, Midwestern, Middle American, white, paternalism? Perhaps. But the heavy beast that lies on your chest at night and chews on your heart as sizzling heat waves distort the grassland that bears your name at the county courthouse is as real as the grass's need for rain. And it is not just the grass. It is everything from the birds and antelope and deer and buffalo to the insects and rodents and microbes. It is everything that means anything to you that needs the rain.

Some would say that there is nothing a rancher can do to make it rain, that it's best to forget it, leave it to providence. But I know that it is an equation: too little rain or too many buffalo. It amounts to nearly the same thing and, while rain is not within the rancher's power, buffalo can be sold or slaughtered. It only takes a willingness to kill your plans and dreams. It only takes the guts to take a financial beating, the guts to jeopardize your future. And so every night for as many days, or months, or years that the drought coils on the land, you wish, perhaps even pray, for rain. You tell yourself that it's all subject to the cycles of the land. You try not to let the specter of climate change into your head. You tell yourself that there is a balance. Ying and yang. Famine and plenty. You are just too close. Life and death are the two sides of the same coin. Then your middle-classness wags it's judgmental finger and you feel bad for wishing that the coin would fall your way.

Well, a month ago the pattern of drought seemed to shift. We have not yet been saved but over the past three weeks we've received over three inches and that is a respectable amount of spring moisture for this dry country. It is enough to make us all think that there may be more to come. It makes us spring out of bed in the morning. Ever the optimists, a paltry three inches of rain is enough to make us shake our heads and laugh at ourselves for loosing sleep. What was all that worrying about, anyway?

Of that three inches of moisture, maybe half came in the form of a very late spring blizzard. For years Jill and I have been talking about how nice it would be to get snowed in. During the last five cold, dry winters we dreamed of the old days when a foot of snow and a driving wind would seal up the driveway and force us to forsake our modern American, frenetic motion and simple hunker down like everything else. We longed to be driven inside, in front of a fireplace, and have a couple days when all there was to do was to read, and snuggle, and watch the snow shoot past the windows. But, of course, we do not live in Robert Frost's New England. We live on the Great Plains where blizzards are often accompanied by surprises, cruelties, and inevitable dualities.

Our blizzard came on the first day of May and was far more wind than snow. It was not that cold, but still the wind chill was merciless. I was reading Falling Through the Earth and that book's story and beautiful phrasing helped me slow to the blizzard-enduring pace I had hoped for. I was not worried about the buffalo. All of this was in our management plan, which of course is designed after the buffalo's own plan. They were fine. There could be losses but it was unlikely since the herd, moving over its winter pasture had survived many much more severe days. The birds that had just arrived from their winter in Texas, Central, and South America were a different story. They flocked to our bird feeders on the deck outside our windows and, as the day wore on with no let-up of wind or snow, I found my eyes drifting more and more often above the page and scanning the motley flock of birds on our deck.

There was the usual compliment of winter and year around inhabitants: juncos, English sparrows, a couple blue jays, chickadees, and they were getting by just fine. They used the wind as they flittered from deck to feeder. The driving snow did not seem to bother them. But the new arrivals: the white-crowed sparrows, the red-winged black birds, the grackles, the towhees, gold finches, the mourning doves suffered. They huddled against the wind and seemed only to eat when the winter birds flipped grain from the feeders. They were the picture of misery and for the last part of that first day my reading slowed as I weighed the benefits of this blizzard in terms of moisture, against the potential for loss.

By the next morning the bird count of the deck had skyrocketed. Brewer's black-birds had come from who-knows-where to scrounge for food. They fought with brown headed buffalo-birds, black-headed grosbeaks, yellow-headed black-birds, and bedraggled robins for the food. There was not much reading that morning. Jill and I watched the birds skirmishing under the feeders like refugees out of control. The storm was projected to break by afternoon and I honestly believed that these solders of evolution would finally benefit from their early arrival. The moisture that had lashed them for forty hours would give their off-spring an advantage that would carry their genes forward.

The snow quit about three o'clock and the wind died toward nightfall. But it got cold that night and at first light the birds still sat fluffed and squinty-eyed. It was not until the sun rose to ten o'clock that the temperature started upward and the snow began to melt. It soaked in like a dream rain and the grass that appeared shone bright green and already growing. By late that afternoon much of the snow was gone and the temperature was in the sixties. Our back yard transformed from an avian refugee camp to a cathedral of song. When I walked out to start the ATV for my first post-storm survey it was almost as if nothing had happened. The birds were pairing up as I moved to the shop and by the time I made it to the fence line I thought might need checking, we were beginning the most hopeful spring in six years.

I tooled long the muddy fence lost in the assessment of the speed with which the conditions of life can change. I made a conscious effort to recall the worry and stress I had felt only two weeks before. It was all I could do to keep that slender, wet, blizzard from overwhelming me with joy. Such joy was as undeserved as the pain of drought had been but I might well have given into it had I not come across the dead mourning dove.

It is a rare thing to fine a dead bird in a healthy pasture – there is seldom anything in a healthy pasture that will kill and not eat them. But the spring blizzard that might well have saved me did not feed on the flesh of birds. It froze and starved the bird without passion or need. I slid off the ATV and picked up the dove. I couldn't help thinking that all winter long, when I was beside myself with despair over the drought; this bird had been feeding in warm Mexican millet fields. It had dodged death in a thousand forms and survived the most difficult part of a dove's existence, the first year of life. I studied the slight iridescence of its neck. It had made it home to breed on these Northern Plains only to die in a freak blizzard. In my hand the little bird was weightless. Nothing but hollow bones and feathers.

---

by Gervase Hittle

It may be a little late in the season to write about the signs of Spring, as we see them out here on the Cheyenne River Ranch. There are a few things here on the prairie that many people seldom, if ever, have the opportunity to witness. That does not mean to suggest that we have something particularly unique--quite the opposite, but the prairie offers an abundance of interesting, even fascinating signs of spring.

All of the usual things happen: snow and ice melt; wind continues its rampage; trees, shrubs, and flowers bud and flourish; robins and doves reappear; everything begins to turn green; Sandhill Cranes, geese and ducks move across the skies and use their traditional resting places; deer begin to grow their antlers.

And one day in March or April, perhaps while on horseback riding on a gathering of cow/calf pairs for a branding at one of the neighbors, a startled Burrowing Owl flies from one Prairie Dog burrow to another. Its flight startles you, too, because you thought it was yet too early for them to be back on their breeding territories. This small observation can serve to alert the observer, who to this point, has been casual, or locked into winter mode, or intensely focused on the job at hand.

Now there stands a buck antelope off to one side on the slope of a hill, staunchly defiant on a territory he has established in his quest to gather a band of does. He stands and watches you pass and may even take a step or two toward you, as if to say: "Move on by, stranger, I have staked this claim."

On another day, perhaps a little later, there appears a pair of Long-billed Curlews. They fly at an altitude of about fifty feet and stay one hundred yards away, their down-curved wings and the long, down-curved bills unmistakable. They glide to a running landing in a greening pasture. They will reside there until late summer.

Then you might see a Turkey Vulture, or a Cooper's Hawk. The male Kestrel has already been here for a month waiting to attract a mate when the females return. And high in the sky, a pair of Red-Tailed Hawks performs their intricate aerial, courtship display flight, circling up almost out of sight and diving in a long, fast angle toward the nest tree. They land lightly, delicately even, with outspread wings breaking their descent, with unbelievable efficiency. They perch elegantly as if nothing extraordinary had just happened.

And later, or sooner, as it sometimes happens, usually between the end of March and the middle of April, a little, wobbly, golden furred and fluffy little critter nuzzles its mother, perhaps at some distance from the main herd; usually with its yearling and two year old siblings in attendance. Shortly thereafter the buffalo cow will bring her newborn to meet the rest of the herd.

These signs of Spring appear without fanfare, but always to surprise the complacent observer out of his or her casual, or tired Winter mode.

Spring has arrived; the madness of March, the cruelty of April not withstanding.