Goodnight Mary Ann - A Buffalo in the House: the True Story of a Man, an Animal, and the American West

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Table of Contents

Other Books by R.D. Rosen

NONFICTION
Psychobabble
Me and My Friends, We No Longer Profess Any Graces:
A Premature Memoir

MYSTERY NOVELS
Dead Ball
World of Hurt
Saturday Night Dead
Fadeaway
Strike Three Youre Dead

HUMOR
Bad President
Bad Baby
Bad Dog
(all co-authored with Harry Prichett and Rob Battles)
Bad Cat
(co-authored with Jim Edgar, Harry Prichett, and Rob Battles)
Not Available in Any Store

to Ellen Cathy Lewis

Mans anxiety is a function of his sheer ambiguity and of his complete powerlessness to overcome that ambiguity, to be straightforwardly an animal or an angel.

Ernest Becker, Denial of Death

While we regret that the present is not like the past and despair of its ever becoming the future, its innumerable inscrutable habits lie in wait for their meaning. I want to gather them, like somebodys grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.

Diane Arbus, in a 1963 project proposal for a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship

Note: Bison bison is the scientific name for the American buffalo. The terms bison and buffalo are used interchangeably by many people, including me.

PROLOGUE

May 2000

He emerged into the spring morning and lay exhausted in the grass while his mother licked him ardently, freeing him from the remnants of birth. He was bright orange, almost red. For wolves and other predators, he might as well have been a neon sign in the wilderness flashing EAT, but evolution had looked after him in other ways. Within minutes of birth he would be able to stand; within an hour he would be walking. Wet and wobbly, he struggled to get up once, twice, before rising precariously to his feet on the third try. He stood there, teetering, while his mother continued cleaning him with more licks, as intently and proudly as a human mother might wield a damp washcloth on her sons first day of school. He ducked under her and found the udder, pulling on it as if he had been doing it forever, and the warm milk filled his mouth.

Nature had done him another favor by providing company. All calves came in the warm, green months of April and May. Newborns and young calves dotted his new world as far as he could see. Some of the one-month-olds, already turning brown with a dark stripe down their spines, were prancing, kicking up their heels, and jousting with each other amid the purple lupine and golden arrowleaf balsam root. But also, as far as he could see, there were grazing grown buffalopregnant cows, nursing mothers, and big-humped bullsan army of protectors.

He was intrigued by all the motion and found himself stumbling among the others, drinking in the odors, sights, and sounds. The air was filled with the grunts of other mothers signaling to their wayward calves. Fascinated by his own mobility, he drifted farther away from his own mother. He approached a two-thousand-pound bull bison, sniffed him, then bunted him with his nose. The bull was majestically indifferent. In an instant his mother was by his side, reclaiming him, and he quietly curled himself around her foreleg, ready to nurse again.

That afternoon, his very first, he strayed again, sampling smells, when suddenly the great brown blur around him turned and began to move slowly in one direction. Some bulls, with their immense, serene, horned heads and their mountainous humps, pressed against him. He had no choice but to move with the powerful tide that carried him along as the air grew cluttered with grunts and guttural bellowing and filled with the dust stirred up by a thousand hooves. The commotion was terrible. He listened vainly for his mothers call. The pace quickened and his legs soon trembled with fatigue. He could not keep up. The bigger ones passed by, pushing him aside, squeezing him to the fringe of the herd, finally expelling him. He stopped, blinking, and watched as the herd moved past. Finally, he folded his legs and lay down to rest in the tall grass as the last of them, groups of mothers and their young, then an old bull or two, their coats torn and tattered, their hides scarred from ancient fights, grew small in the distance. He closed his eyes, a startling, vulnerable splash of orange in this Idaho valley.

Here he would wait for his mother.

one

Veryl Goodnight held the receiver against her ear with a shrugged shoulder while she wiped the clay off her hands with a rag. She was a well-known sculptor in bronze of animals, frontier women, and other Western subjectsand a beautiful, young-looking woman in her fifties with a soft, sibilant voice.

Its Marlo Goble. How are you today?

Veryl Goodnights heart jumped. Dr. Marlo Goble was a famous orthopedic surgeon with many medical patents to his credit, and a collector of Veryls art as well. But at the moment his key credential was that he owned the Medicine Lodge Buffalo Ranch in Idaho, just west of Yellowstone National Park. It was traditional buffalo country and the site of one of the most famous buffalo jumps, where, for thousands of years, the Plains Indians had hunted buffalo en masse by stampeding them off a bluff.

Im okay, Veryl said. How are you?

Oh, Im just fine. Hows Roger?

Just fine. Hes out in the barn with the horses. She glanced out the window of the studio with its Spanish tile floor and high ceiling. Beyond the barn, even though it was May in Santa Fe, there were still a few dollops of winter snow left on the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Good, good. Im calling because Ive got a two-day-old bison calf here who needs a mother. The lady postman found him yesterday wandering down by the fence on my property.

Finally, she thought. With birthing season almost over, she had just about given up hope. It had been three months since Veryl had written letters to five buffalo ranchers in the West, men who knew her and her work, asking them to let her know if and when they had a bottle babyan orphaned buffalo who needed a temporary human home. Unlike genetically compromised, bred-to-be-docile cattle, mature buffalo cows were extremely self-sufficient, rarely died in childbirth, and even more rarely abandoned their young.

What happened to the mother? she asked, her eyes gliding over the sculpture of three wolves she was working on. Something wasnt right. Like any artist, she saw hundreds of flaws where a bystander would see only the miracle of an animal come to life in clay.

Ill bet my cowboys were moving the herd to another pasture and they didnt notice that one of the cows had given birth. The little guy mustve gotten left behind. By the time we found him, the herd was already miles away. Its a shame, but the good news is that he got a day of nursing in. Thatll stand him in good stead. Youre welcome to come up and take him home for a while.

Well, sure, Veryl said. Absolutely. Let me find out when Roger can fly us up.

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