Fight or Flight
We are always alert, our ears panning for the sounds of men,
their horses or wagon wheels.
I find my body orienting itself toward the wind, waiting for the hated odor that twangs my fraught nerves and triggers our flight, yet again.
I don’t want to leave this sequestered place. The snow has just melted from its protective slopes, moistening the thirsty earth below and reviving the short scrubby grass after a long winter rest.[1]
There are so few of us now. I used to feel comforted by the nearness of my sisters, and they by my attentive calls.
My shepherding of their young when their new calves arrived.
There are so few babies now. We cannot let down our guard to breed as we used to. Two lame bulls[2] follow us but they barely have the energy to register when we are in estrus.[3]
When we do conceive our bodies can no longer nourish the unborn. We are haunted by those stolen from us. The mothers that aren’t killed fighting off the snatchers return again and again to the site of their loss.[4]
We have learned[5] that our bonds no longer protect us,
but draw the men to us,
so we scatter ourselves even further at the slightest disturbance, leaving only our tracks to betray us.[6]
The earth has been dry so long.[7]
There are fewer bodies to wallow in the earth, so there are fewer places to hold the little water we have. We return to the old ones. We smell the soil, cracked and hard. We scent the lingering musk of urine and bodies and know before we reach them that they hold nothing for us.
It is dim and rain drizzles as the night lifts. A sweet and pungent dusty balm rises from the earth as soil and plants drink in the long awaited moisture.[8]
My body is alive with these sensations and I don’t detect them until they are amongst us, and then I am frantic with fear. We scatter and gallop in every direction, but the knowledge in our blood draws us back together again and we bolt towards the wind.[9]
They are still at our backs.
We cannot stop moving.
We might still out run them.
The bulls cannot keep up and drift away, but these men are not enticed by weakness the way wolves would be. We strain every nerve to escape.[10]
Night settles and they keep pressing us. The sun rises again and they are still there. Three nights and days they keep at our heels.
Our bodies are made to go without, but still the strain of forsaking even a drink of water begins to take its toll.[11]
I am leading my sisters when I scent them.
Urine and sweat and dead skin wafts towards me on a breeze exhaled from a canyon mouth. I turn and lead some of my sisters and their young onto an open prairie. [12]
My instincts have betrayed me, betrayed us.
A man and horse gain on us and I can taste my terror. I hear the oscillating whistle of a lasso and then the grunting desperate cry of a calf. I hear him fall. A thud, thud thud, and dragging and scraping.[13]
The galloping of the horse’s hooves still sound behind me. I don’t dare slow to look until they stop. The man is on top of the little one.
Her mother has rushed on and can’t stop to whirl on him in time, and in an instant he is back on his horse pursuing us. His rope finds another of our young and pulls him down, but now we know what he is here for, and my sister turns to save her calf at all cost. She is a blur of bristled hair as she charges him, but there is a crack of thunder, and mushrooming from the deafening sound is the acrid smoky rotting smell of water that cannot breathe. My sister staggers a few strides from the source of her pain and sinks to the earth.
Disoriented by the sound and smell of death I barely register the hum of the rope when it strikes out and brings down our last baby.
Three of us manage to escape together and avoid the men for a few days. We search for our lost kin, scenting the air and ground in our incessant movement, but they are lost to us.
Our bodies hum with an uncomfortable heat as we shelter at the base of a small hill.
Our tormentors appear suddenly and without warning over its crest. I am rooted; trembling and paralyzed where I stand as a cyclone of horses and dust descend on me. One of us, who I don’t know because we move as one now, breaks the trance of fear and runs. We are all flying. Again, our blood guides us against the wind, the dry dirt rising behind, trailing us and cloaking our escape. But still they gain on us, and then there is a ridge in front of us and we veer as one to follow it.
My sister is in front of me, another behind. The last of our band. And then a sweating, heaving horse is at my shoulder so close he grazes my bristled hair. I cannot escape him and my muscles flood with the message, “attack”. I pivot on my quaking back legs and drive my practiced horn into his side. He staggers away from me and then I hear over my rushing blood the whirling trill of the rope. The man’s arm moves in an instant and the rope strikes at my leg like snakes I have trampled. All at once this rope closes around my leg. It constricts and snaps my limb in place. And then I am falling, my body turning over and over as it has never done before. Ground, men, horses, sister, my senses reach out for them but they are a tumbling confusion like my body.
Something closes around my hind foot. My legs are being dragged apart, my body stretched painfully, exposed.
Terror.
Terror.
Terror. Thrashing. Fighting. I must stand.
Another man is on the ground nearing me. My feet must find the ground. They cannot so I thrash at him with my horns, but prone I hit only my own sides. Pain rattles my ribs and I scent blood. I must dash him with my loose hoof. I slash again and again, but he evades me. A burning is filling me from the inside out. My legs become heavy and slow. He slips something cold around my striking leg. What is this? It is hard and bites and pulls at my hair. Now he is trying to trap my back leg too. I fight with the last of my desperate strength, but his rope finds my free leg and draws it close to its prone fellow. He pulls and shakes the rattling trap.[14]
He leaves me. He is back on his horse. The ropes stretching me relent. I kick and roll in my binding and get my hooves under me.
I rise.
I breathe hard. Every follicle of hair is charged with my anger. My fury has kept me alive. I charge at them but I fall hard. Again. Again. Again.
I cannot fight. I try to run. I fall hard, but the ropes slip from my feet. The heavy hard trap does not.
The men ride by on their horses, leaning low to the ground and retrieve their ropes. I am beyond caring now. The pulsing energy that had fueled my fight is ebbing now. I hear horses’ hooves retreating. I stand so still, my breath a struggle to gain.
When the scent of the men dissipates my sisters return to me. They are weary of my hobbles but sense my distress.
They lead now, and I follow. My thirst is so overwhelming, my body so hot under my shaggy coat.
In summer I would roll in a cool dusty wallow, made for me by generations of my kin. But I can’t lie down. I am afraid I won’t be able to rise again. Besides, this heat is burning from the inside out.
We don’t make it far, and I don’t smell what I long for; the cool, verdant, dusky smell of water. My tongue hangs dry, black and swollen from my mouth.
It is growing dark. We try to keep moving but my haunches are drooping down and the burning is in every part of me. It is bright, vivid, and constant.
The pain is mercifully starting to dull in the dark, but I feel it pooling hot and liquid around the squeezing at my hocks. It itches under my skin, tight and inescapable.
My mind goes blank for a while, and then I don’t know where I am, but I scent my sisters still nearby.
Urine flows from me, the first release since my chase and capture. It smells wrong, dark and bloodied.
The darkness lifts but my eyes are dim.
My head is bent low to the earth and I cannot lift it. I am dimly aware of scavengers following me. Waiting.
My legs stiffen. They will not move. They jerk in spasms and the bonds bite into me. Shocks like lighting shoot through me.[15]
I fall.
Nothingness.
The world enters my awareness again. I breathe in the earth, the renewing grass, my sisters. I will my head up but it barely shifts on the dusty ground. The whirring of my blood in my ears grows fainter and slows. My body is growing quiet. It creeps slowly. The absence of feeling is shocking after the burning that plagued me. The darkness draws over my eyes, ears, nose. I…
[1] “Fourteen buffalo were hiding in the breaks of the sandhills [sic]. This was a sequestered locality, where man rarely penetrated, where man rarely penetrated, and where the grass was green, as the snow had drifted on the sides of the divides and moistened the earth, thereby giving vegetation an early start.” Jones 203
[2] “The bulls were very poor and shaggy” Jones 204
[3] “They had been prospecting over a great range of country in the northwestern Texas, and luckily had located two small herds of buffalo, one of which comprised two bulls and twelve cows.” Jones 203
[4] “A pathetic sight was sometimes witnessed when the mother of one of these families was killed at the first shot. They were so devoted to her that they would linger, and wait until the last one could easily be slain. Often have I so crippled a calf that it was impossible for it to follow and its pitiful bleating would hold the family until I could kill all desired. Should the calf be wounded in the fore or hind parts, the old cows would actually support the part so crippled, and it would walk away on the normal parts by such aid” Jones 234
[5] George Millward McDougall, a Methodist missionary and founder of the McDougall Residential School in Alberta recorded a Blackfoot law that “Not one buffalo is allowed to escape. The young and the poor must die with the strong and fat, for it is believed that if there were spared they would tell the rest, and so make it impossible to bring anymore buffalo into a pound”. McDougall 282
[6] “The buffalo were scattered to the four winds, and hide away in deep cañons [sic]. They instinctively know their doom is sealed. How differently they appear form those of old… They now keep their sense of sight, smell, sound and feeling wrought up to such a tension that they are often gone before we have discovered their presence, only their tracks remaining to betray their former haunts.” Jones 202
[7] “It appears there has been no rain in this desert for years past” Jones 202
[8] “The day broke dark and drizzling” Jones 204
[9] “We routed the shaggy beasts early, and never were animals more surprised. They were terribly alarmed at our unexpected presence, perfectly frantic with fear and began to stampede in every direction, but they soon joined the main herd.” Jones 204
[10] “Nearer and nearer he approached the frightened little brutes, which now seeing they were pursued, strained every nerve to escape” Jones 204
[11] “The bulls were very poor and shaggy, soon dropping out, leaving the twelve cows, which by the third day of the chase became so gentle we could ride within two hundred yards of them without any difficulty.” Jones 204
[12] “On that afternoon, as we were passing the mouth of a canon, five immense cows and three baby buffaloes winded us, and dashed out into the prairie, much to our astonishment and delight” Jones 204
[13] Jones’ employee Lee Howard captured this calf. Jones describes the hiss of his lasso as it gained momentum, “its velocity increasing as he gained on the soon to be captives. Gradefully it shot far out in a beautiful curve and coiled around the neck of the calf in the lead, although it was hugging its escited mother’s shaggy shoulders” the calf “tumbled in a heap.” The horse galloped passed him and the calf “began to dangle like a rubber ball on a string.” Jones 205.
[14] Coming upon a group of cows with no calves Jones decides to hobble one as an experiment. He used two 2foot long-chain hobbles with heavy buckled straps on either end. She tried to fight back when Jones approached her to fasten the hobbles, she “struck at [him] until her ribs rattled, as her head pounded her sides in her fruitless efforts to reach [him]; then she used her loose foot kicking and striking until she was actually exhausted.” Jones 215.
[15] “Capture myopathy is a pathophysiological manifestation where the inherent biological stress defenses of an animal have failed or are in the process of failing… It is believed to arise from the inflicted stress and physical exertion that typically occur with prolonged or short intense pursuit, capture, restraint or transportation of wild animals… Clinically, the animal usually presents with a combination of any of the following signs: lethargy, muscular stiffness, weakness, incoordination, recumbence, partial paralyses, metabolic acidosis, myoglobinuria and death… Macropathology typically reveals muscle necrosis, dark red-stained renal medullae and dark-coloured urine.” Breed et al. 2.