Where the Buffalo Roam, Amateur Wranglers Ride Herd, or Try

Tim Driscoll deposited a double fistful of onions on his chili and considered the difference between the bison he chased all morning and the cows he used to chase.

“Horns,” he offered between bites.

“And they turn on you. So you’ve got to watch what you’re doing. And the old hurt bulls are cranky. So you’ve got to be ready to run.”

Driscoll hefted an onion-covered hamburger to his mouth. It was lunch hour on the first day of the bison roundup at the National Bison Range, the day fence builders and carpenters and biologists become wranglers.

Driscoll was in shirt sleeves, defying the winter’s cold blowing off the Mission Mountains. He’s done ranch work all his life--until 10 years ago on cattle ranches, since then at the bison range.

“It’s all just work,” he said.

Except early each October, when the fence menders turned wranglers bring in the range’s 400 bison plus calves. Then it’s a week on horseback clearing the pastures of strays and pushing the assembled herd to a steep-sloped, high-fenced ravine just above the corral.

And two days of cutting a couple dozen animals at a time from the herd and running them hard--downhill--to the corral for culling, branding and vaccinating. One hundred animals are sold to private ranches or donated to Indian tribes, bison researchers or other wildlife refuges, the rest returned to relative freedom on the 16,000-acre refuge.

A few big old bulls successfully resisted this year’s effort at assembly, Driscoll said. Two hid in the brush, then jumped a couple of cattle guards and went through a fence. The cowboys gave chase until their horses tired.

They left another along the creek bottom--”Old Creek Bottom,” Driscoll said. “There’s always a hurt old bull down there and we always call him Old Creek Bottom, but I think it’s a different hurt old bull every year.”

Push a bull too hard, and he’ll lift his tail straight, look you in the eye and charge, Driscoll said. The best response? “Run.”

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The National Bison Range was born in 1908 of the campaign to save the American bison from extinction. Thirty animals were pastured here then. Ten others were added later.

All the rest--a hundred or more calves a year these years--were bred and born at the bison range, each recorded at the annual roundup and branded with its year of birth. This decade on the right hip, next decade on the left.

Range manager Dave Wiseman keeps the herd to about 400 animals, what the grass can sustain over the long winter. He tries, too, to keep the ratio of cows to bulls at about what a herd would have in the wild: 40% bulls, 60% cows.

The longer bison are kept in fenced environs--at the bison range, they’re rotated among eight fenced pastures--the more important the efforts to keep the herd as wild as possible. Otherwise, Wiseman says, they’ll just be shaggy-headed cows.

Doubt not, though, that these bison are wild, said Darren Thomas, most days the fencing foreman at the National Bison Range, but for roundup a wrangler.

Doubt not, too, that Thomas was the wildest of the riders at this fall’s roundup--and the only one wearing tennis shoes. “Cowboy boots?” he hooted to a co-worker’s inquiry. “I’m not a cowboy.”

“I love chasing buffaloes,” Thomas said soon after racing 200 out of the ravine where they had pastured overnight. “Not as much as I love building fence, though.”

“I’d just as soon chase buffaloes and break fences in the morning, then build fence all afternoon. That would be nice.”

Monday morning, the chase began with three wranglers--Thomas included--at the top of a ridge turned red, then quickly orange, then beige by the rising sun. The bison squeezed together, smelling the slow approach of horses and riders. The horses shivered in anticipation.

Buffalo, Thomas explained, smell different than cows. And these horses love running after buffalo. “They’re like dogs chasing cars,” he said. “They want to go.”

And so they did, the wranglers spreading wide across the hill, the bison stampeding down and around, igniting a dust cloud under and behind, lumbering more than thundering, parting to negotiate a mid-hill marsh, then swarming tightly back together.

The riders whooped and hollered, the bison grunted and snorted like pigs, the silence of the dawn erased.

Bison don’t walk. They stand or they stampede. And so, too, must the horses and riders. Driving the herd is dangerous work, although less dangerous than trying to move five or six animals. Then you get five or six attitudes. In the herd, all follow the lead of “mama boss cow,” down the hill, around the corner and through a gate.

“Nice,” proclaimed Thomas. “Very nice.”

Trouble, the wranglers know, is never more than a horn’s length away.

Bill West relearned the lesson this roundup, when a big bull with stubby horns turned on him during a hillside run. West was 100 yards away, but covered 50 yards of the gap to show the bull he meant business.

The bull did the same, lifting its tail and dropping its head. When West signaled a retreat to his horse, the animal stood its ground. The bull kept coming, butting head-to-chest with the horse, sending horse and rider to the earth.

Better to have a horse that--if not fears--at least respects the size and strength of a bison, West said. Both he and his horse weathered their encounter with the bull, but West wasn’t looking for a repeat.

“My horse is a little too excited,” he said after a morning of cutting bison from the main herd and bringing them into the corral. “That last run, he just about passed the herd. He’s like a horse at the racetrack.”

Still, West insists that horses--not riders--do most of the work at the roundup. “I’m just holding on,” he said. “I wasn’t hired for my horsemanship. I was hired for my biology. I was hired because I know weeds.”

And, in fact, the only serious injury this fall came when a fence mender bricklayer turned cowboy took a four-wheeler rather than a horse up the hill to split the herd in half the day before the roundup’s start.

Skip Palmer and the ATV hit a ditch, flipped and landed just wrong, breaking Palmer’s arm in two places. When he met the other riders at dawn the next day, Palmer’s arm was in a sling and his work relegated to watching through a gate at the corral.

“I’ve been bucked off a horse a few times, but those motorcycles will kill you,” Palmer said.

Brent Woodger has three words of advice for first-time riders at the bison roundup: “Don’t get hooked.”

Bison are “five times stronger and 10 times faster than a cow,” Woodger said, saddling an appaloosa for the coming afternoon on the hill. “If they look at you, you’d better just let them go.”

Woodger is a horseshoer at the bison range and one of the more adept riders. Bison will turn in mid-stampede and head back at you, he said. But it all happens so fast, there’s no time to be scared--only time to move out of the way.

Which is what Woodger did when a bull pivoted and retreated from the cut, making the crowd in the corral gasp. “Another near miss,” came the exclamation. “Yikes,” the reply.

At 1,800 to 1,900 pounds, the big old bulls always have the right-of-way, Woodger said later. But it is actually the old cows--wranglers call them “the big old heads”--who balk at making the final run to the corral.

“They remember being here before,” he said. “They know what’s coming, and they aren’t interested.”