wildlife guide: the bisonry

BISON. Bison, collectively, are my Yellowstone crush...

...bordering on monomaniac obsession. Every time I see one my heart about jumps out of my chest. You would think after seeing them a million times a day for a week my swoonery would cease some, but it hasn't. Nor has my excitement about living near them lessened, even after getting trapped in the Mammoth Hotel by them* or bushwhacking an uphill path seventy-five-foot-safe. Nay. I am straight-up crazy about the bison.

A bison is not a water buffalo. Nor is it a cow. 'Tis a gloriously hooved, horned, sloping-shouldered mini-mountain of snuffly herbivore wildness. They amble over miles with their friends and kin. Their foraging is endless and unceasing and epic. They Are Yellowstone. They Are the American West.

They are also HUGE. And huge. Like, 1500 pounds worth of huge. I think if they hadn't been most unfortunately largely killed, we would all have to live in forts so as not to be trampled by their thousands. This time of year their ribs stick out and they're having BABIES. YES, BABIES. BABY BISON.

I TOOK THIS PHOTO. Also this one:

Bison like to wander upon the road. Perhaps it gives their hooves a break. By and by they realize there is still nothing to eat on the asphalt, so then they wander off again. In the meantime, traffic jams and panic and photographic frenzies abound. Whenever I get on a bus, I secretly pray I will encounter some bison on the road very closely and therefore break the 25-yard-distant rule, but also not get tossed.

A tossing, depicted.

Unfortunately, everyone outside of the Park hates bison and considers them the devil's own ungulates. Bison are democratically regarded as a menace. State senators call them "a creeping cancer," "woolly tanks" "in need of management." Montanans are dying to shoot them. Tourists are gored by them annually. In the West, bison are almost as controversial as wolves. And when you are stopped in your little tin car waiting for the biggest, blackest, massivest bison in Yellowstone to step off the road so you can drive on but instead he is ambling right for you, your liver can't help but produce liquid nitrogen.

But guess what? When you live in a place with snowdrifts thirty feet deep, and grizzly bears and black bears and wolves and mountain lions all lust after your flesh and the blood of your offspring, and the times and the foliage are changing fast, and you are poached on an unrelenting basis and scopeless scale, you have to be tough. And so? They are. And that is why I love the bison.**

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*Because when you are sketching something and suddenly you realize a herd is closing in around you to snuffle the lawn and the 25-yard rule is consequently violated and you accidentally make a noise and that big one there looks at you alarmed, you have to go and hide out in the Mammoth Hotel. Even if it's closed for the season. Until you realize twenty minutes later there is a back door that has been unencumbered with bison all this time and you can go home safely.

**And also because I saw one scratching itself on a post in a parking lot today and a guy driving by stuck his head out the window and said, "I thought that spot was handicapped only! Does he look handicapped to you?" (He didn't - the bison was fully intact, just itchy.) People in Wyoming have a good sense of humor, now that spring is here.