What would make them stay? Wildlife protection! Especially when you could make a good living at it, better than the debt-ridden drought-stricken winter-blasted poisonous hardscrabble farming that people had been attempting for the previous two centuries. All that effort had gotten them nothing but a dust bowl and mounting debt, and kids moving away, and early death. A category error from the start, an ecological illiteracy. Time for a change.
So, we would go to county supervisors, and town council meetings, and church meetings, and state legislature meetings, and county fairs, and trade shows, and school assemblies, and every kind of meeting, all the meetings no one ever thinks to go to and deeply regrets going to the moment they do, and we would make our case and show the photos and the figures, and see what we could do. Offer them woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers if that’s what it took, although to tell the truth people in the upper Midwest seldom go for that. Their idea of charismatic megafauna is their chocolate Lab.
It was working pretty well, when we ran into a snag. A militia group with a burr up its ass declared that even though we had the right to cross the state border from Montana into North Dakota, leading a herd of buffalo as the vanguard of a suite of animals that included, yes, lions and panthers and bears, oh my!— they were going to stop us. It was their God-given right as Americans to stand their ground and kill trespassers of any kind, animal or human. And some private property owners along the state border were willing to let these guys congregate and block our passage when we crossed the state line. They organized a mob who all drove to these properties in their fat pick-up trucks and prepared to meet us with their guns blazing. It was a flashpoint, a media event.
Well, fine. Media events can be good. The trick is to handle them right. Which of course includes not getting killed.
So, we could send in a herd of ten thousand buffalo and crush them underfoot, like in that movie. Very satisfying, but not really serving the larger purpose. Not a good hearts and minds kind of move. Or we could walk in front of the animals with our families, put the kids in the vanguard holding their pet ducks and raccoons, and overwhelm them with love and kindness and puppies. Uncertain that, and dangerous. A great media image, and yet not a good idea.
We ended up going with cowboys wrangling a herd of wild horses. Also some sheep and sheepdogs, as if to reconcile the old Western fight between those two competing ways of wrecking the land. And these were wild horses, and wild sheep and wild mountain goats. The sheepdogs were domestic of course, they were just there to get dogs involved. Not that they aren’t great at sheepherding, because they are. But they were useful for more than that. They were the Midwest’s emotional support animals, their link between man and beast.
Then, behind that vanguard of cowboys and sheepdogs, the whole parade. Buffalo, elk, moose, bears— it was like an old-fashioned circus come to town. We kind of wished we did have a woolly mammoth or two. And we lowballed the wolves and the mountain lions; they didn’t like to keep company with us anyway, and they could sneak in later at night, in their usual way. It wasn’t natural to even see a mountain lion, they like to lie low and are extremely nocturnal. In my whole life I’ve only seen one once in the wild, and in truth it was terrifying. I thought I was done for.
So the day came, and we alerted the press, and people showed up from all over the world. So many people wanted to march with us that there were more people than animals, and the animals were getting spooked, naturally. But we started up anyway, right after dawn, and hit the state line across a ten-mile front, like a World War One over-the-top assault. And it did look kind of over the top.
Those poor animal murderers never had a chance. Actually quite a few of them stood their ground and shot a bunch of animals. Mostly deer, it turned out, as we had sent them out as scouts, poor guys. The first wave. Deer are the sad sacks of American wildlife, so beautiful, so defenseless, so numerous, so dim. Their chief predator is cars. They never seem to get it, about cars or anything else; or maybe they do, but they don’t have a good way to transmit what they learn to their kids, if they happen to get lucky and live past their youth. It’s important always to remember that even if they’re as common as rats, some kind of mammal weed, they are still beautiful wild animals, getting by on their own in a dangerous world. I always say hi when I see them, and try to remember to get the same thrill I would if I were to see someone unusual, like a wolverine. It’s hard, but it’s a habit you can build. Love your deer! Just fence your veggie garden really well.
So, the day went about as well as we hoped. A few deer were killed, a few animal murderers and all-round jerks were embarrassed by the lame ways they had to stand down or slip away and pretend it had never happened. We even got good film of pick-up trucks driving away at speed, also of a duck hunter’s blind demolished in a charge of buffalo who
