December 05, 2005

Not long ago…

Not long ago I had the pleasure of driving down the length of the Great Plains from my home in the Dakotas to South Texas. I passed through nearly all of five large states and as I drove I watched the land change. To the careful observer there is a world of difference in topography, flora, and fauna between the Missouri River breaks of South Dakota and the Cap Rock of Texas. Even the people change: from the stern northern European Lutherans of the Northern Plains to the slow talking Baptists and Hispanics of the Llano Estacada. But the similarities are overwhelming. Blue stem, grama, wheat-grass is everywhere. The pickup is seldom out of the gaze of pronghorn antelope and mule deer. Migrating hawks and waterfowl shadow your progress north in the spring and south in the autumn.

October 07, 2005

It's five o'clock in the morning

It’s five o’clock in the morning of the most important day of the year. Upstairs the coffee is perking and already I’ve stepped outside three times – just to bear witness, to feel what is taking place, to be touched in the same way as every other object and organism on this ranch. Last night the temperature slid below the magic bearer of freezing. The first frost. There is no adept metaphor. When I first stepped outside this morning the world was irredeemably different than it was when I went to bed.

September 07, 2005

An excerpt from the first full draft of his new novel, "Stolen Horses"…

An excerpt from the first full draft of his new novel, “Stolen Horses”.

The sun was touching the horizon as Leo and Carl topped the ridge on the way back to the house. Purples and reds shot over their heads and fanned out toward the east. The air was dead calm and the world was as quiet as it can be. Carl was thinking back on the afternoon, engrossed in the detail of memory, when a trio of grouse winged overhead. He wouldn’t have known the grouse were anywhere near if Leo wouldn’t have heard them and looked up. When Carl followed his dog’s stare he saw the birds flying high above just as the intermittent chuckles and the whir of their wings reached his ears.

July 07, 2005

One of the first buffalo…

One of the first buffalo that came to this ranch was a scrawny orphan with a crooked horn. He couldn’t have weighed over forty pounds and no one was betting that he would even survive, let alone thrive. The twisted horn is what gave him his name, Curly Bill, and it wasn’t long into that first tough winter that the little urchin began to win our heats. He was a bit of an ugly duckling and several buffalo managers more knowledgeable than I took one look at him and advised me not to make him herd bull. They said this with a chuckle and meant that Curly Bill should not be allowed to breed. They judged his genes detrimental to my buffalo herd and urged me buy some “quality bulls” to improve my herd.

June 07, 2005

I have never been…

I have never been to the Mission San Juan Capistrano but my mother told me about the swallows. What I remember from her stories is what many of us remember from the legend of The Swallows of Capistrano: There is an old Catholic mission somewhere in far off California where swallows return each year to mark the coming of spring. They leave in the autumn and the evens of the mission buildings are silent and bare all winter. We lived in Ohio where the winters can be silent and bare and my mother would mold that story of the swallow’s returning into a lesson of faith. 

May 03, 2005

The day Jill was due…

The day Jill was due to arrive home from France I got a call that an old friend had just died. Tim Hjort and his family had become my friends through Jill. She and Jilian had lived beside them years ago and something had clicked the way it sometimes does. When I met the Hjort’s it clicked for me too. Tim was just my age, a progressive man who had been raised on a Montana ranch and had ranched in South Dakota for decades. He could be as cynical and cantankerous as I can be. We enjoyed each other’s company and our families enjoyed each other, so greeting Jill with the news of Tim’s impending funeral was tough duty.

March 02, 2005

Now we move into Spring…

Now we move into Spring. Both the Ides of March and the Vernal Equinox have passed. Dawn comes a little earlier each morning; the sun eases itself little by little northward in the eastern sunrise sky. The prairie winds blow and whistle and sometimes howl. But if you are going to live in the prairie, you will live with the winds.

February 06, 2005

The holiday season has come and gone…

The holiday season has come and gone and I can safely say that winter, in its full attire, has arrived.

Let me get you caught up on what’s been happening out here.

Dan and Jill and Erney are deep in the process of taking up permanent residence here at the Cheyenne River Ranch. Needless to say “hectic” right now is normal. Jill’s daughter, Jilian, a senior at New Underwood High School is, along with being an honor roll student, an excellent point guard for the NUHS girls’ basketball team. (Never mind that in the last game she got her nose broken scrapping for a loose ball.) We all support her and go to as many games, both home and away, as we can get to. Jill commutes frequently to the Broken Heart and to the office in Spearfish to keep the administrative parts of Wild Idea Buffalo running smoothly. She also stays busy in her kitchen – which, believe me, is as busy as ever. Dan is presently away from the ranch. He has taken a visiting professor position for the winter quarter at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. He’s teaching a course in Environmental Science and also conducting an upper level course in Creative Writing.

January 05, 2005

On this quiet, chilly, but snowless afternoon…

On this quiet, chilly, but snowless afternoon I started thinking about a part of this ranch’s life that I don’t often write about. Houseguests. We have frequently had houseguests here, and they have done a little bit of almost everything there is to do at the ranch. Our houseguests generally have been: family, friends, business acquaintances (including writers, musicians, photographers, environmentalists, botanists, customer/clients, occasional vacationers, and a hunter or two). Some visitors have just come by, out of interest and curiosity, to see the buffalo, the ranch, and what we do. We try, as much as we can, to show them as much of the ranch workings as they have wanted to see. And we can almost always provide a beer or a glass of wine, a cup of coffee or a bottle of water to accompany a tour.

December 28, 2000

Where the Buffalo Roam, A Controversy Over Meat

By Stephanie Simon
LA Times

While many ranchers pen bison in feedlots before slaughter, free-range advocates hope to create market for steaks with sass.

WHITEWOOD, S.D.-The buffalo bunch up on the ranch out here, big and very dark against the flat forever of the sky. They rip at the prairie grass. They call to one another in a dusky purr.

Dan O’Brien watches, content.