Word: bison
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...adaptation and survival in the harsh beauty of the Great Plains region. The idea for the story came to him during a visit to Miles City, Mont., this summer, when he decided to seek out the lonely spot where, in 1886, the Smithsonian's William Hornaday slaughtered 25 bison for an exhibit at Washington's National Museum of Natural History. Recalls Sidey: "I found the site and stood filled with a sense of being in a primeval time and place. I understood what Montanans mean when they speak of the Big Sky country, the immensity and timelessness...
...heart, something brave and wild. Coffman, who is writing a novel about the return of the buffalo -- the fulfillment of a prayer in an old Indian song -- even tracked down the site near Jordan, Mont., where the Smithsonian's William Hornaday in 1886 found the last of the wild bison. He killed 25 of them, took skins and skeletons back East to mount. Those shaggy monsters roamed the National Museum of Natural History along Washington's Mall for almost 75 years...
...they no longer roam in Yellowstone National Park, except as rare transients, prowling south from Canada. The last resident wolves in the big park were exterminated by Government hunters by the late 1920s. That was a time when animals were thought to be good (elk and bison, for instance) or bad. Wolves had been pursued in the West as if they were not merely bad, but evil. Cattlemen lost entire herds to harsh winters, then spent enormous, irrationally large sums of money taking vengeance on wolves. Barry Lopez, in his haunting book Of Wolves and Men, tells of wolves drenched...
...Yellowstone still lives and is as wondrous as ever. Every 78 minutes or so, Old Faithful clears its throat and sends its geyser spumes as much as 180 ft. into the sky, just as it always has. Bison and elk graze side by side on Swan Lake Flats, and the evening chorus of coyotes calling one another to the hunt echoes hauntingly again across canyons. And soon the RVs, the Conestoga wagons of the late 20th century, will be circling up in campgrounds during summer evenings...
Yellowstone's herd of 2,700 bison was reduced more by a highly controversial hunt last fall and winter just outside the park (570 killed) and harsh weather (260) than by the fire (9). Yellowstone's best-known residents, 200 or so grizzlies, may have been reduced by a total of two as a result of the conflagrations. A pair of bears that had been tagged with radio transmitters could not be located during the winter. Says Assistant Chief Ranger Gary Brown: "The bears don't seem to be frightened by fire. Poaching is a bigger threat by a long...