Prairie Home Companions

Once slaughtered close to extinction, the buffalo roam again across the fields of Yellowstone National Park. Now they have a ghost of a chance.

THE FLIGHT FROM LAX DROPPED INTO BOZEMAN, bucking and jerking the whole way, through a night sky whirling with snow. On the ground, the plows were shoveling deep furrows on the runway. It felt like landing on a pillow. The guy at the Hertz counter said, "It's really coming down," and recommended against the economy model.

Out on the Montana interstate, passing a tractor-trailer, there would be a long second of complete blindness. Twice, the traffic jammed, then crawled around a car that had lost control. The flakes were furious, a swarm.

Farther, out on the lonesome two-lane to Yellowstone, an approaching vehicle flashed its brights, and immediately my headlights swept across a big animal down on the road. The elk lay crumpled like a can, already dead, I hoped. It was like a crime scene with antlers. I tapped my brakes in warning, but I could see in the rearview mirror the truck behind me drive over something solid enough to make the cab bounce. I strangled the steering wheel. The roads emptied out.

At Gardiner, the grocery was closed for the night, so I bought food for the weekend at the last-chance gas station and put together a plastic sack of yellow cheese, meat soup, stale cookies. The rangers had abandoned the entrance kiosk at the Roosevelt Arch. For the next two hours, I must have been the only mechanical movement in Yellowstone National Park, creeping along on scrunching snow across a trippy landscape of light and shadow.

At first, I could see faint tire tracks of a traveler before me, but the trail faded away, replaced by fresh animal sign -- the delicate filigree of sprinting mice or voles, and something heavier, a more predatory cursive, maybe ermine, maybe fox. The snow came, went, came again. An owl, its face as blank as a hockey mask, shot through the high beams. A herd of imperious elk marched up the road, as if I didn't exist, before retreating into darkness. Then I saw the dogs.

There were two of them along the roadside, looking like a pair of hitchhikers. We all stopped what we were doing. They were silvery brown, the color of frost on dead leaves, thick in winter coats. I thought they were too big to be coyotes, and my pulse thrummed with adrenaline: Wolves! I turned off the ignition, killed the lights, stepped out. It was cold. The engine ticked nervously, then gentled down, and I felt the warmth just drain out of me. The dogs were somewhere, invisible. So was the largest population of buffalo in the world, thousands of them, roaming wild in the park, all around me. It was the bison I had come to see. I tried to tune in, but couldn't see a thing. All I heard was a muffled white noise. When I got back into the car and turned on the headlights, the dogs were gone.

An hour later, fried from the drive, I missed the sign for the historic Lamar Valley Buffalo Ranch, drove for miles and finally turned around. One of the volunteers with the Yellowstone Association, Andy Sale, came out into the falling snow and waved me toward the bunkhouse. "We were worried about you," he said. His wife, Frances, gave me a slice of pecan pie, and then everyone went to bed. My cabin was as hot as a kiln. I fell asleep with the door cracked, listening.

THERE WERE A DOZEN OF US REGISTERED IN JANUARY FOR A WEEKEND FIELD SEMINAR titled "The Buffalo Story." In the morning, my classmates were talking about the coyotes. We had heard them all night, singing their strange songs. Those were the dogs I had seen on the road. If they were wolves, someone said at breakfast, you would have known it. "Just wait," they said. Gray wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone from this very ranch in 1995, and they quickly rekindled with the buffalo their ancient rivalries and intimate bonds.

Our instructor was Rick Wallen, the leader of the Yellowstone National Park Bison Ecology and Management Office. Rick is size XXL, with a burly beard and black hair plastered down like a mountain man in a tintype photograph from the Old West. He is one of those PhD ecologists who looks awkward behind a desk, even though he says things like "optimal foraging theory would suggest . . ." when he's talking about the population density of bison in the Greater Yellowstone Eco-system, one of the largest nearly intact pieces of temperate real estate on the planet.

Everyone drained their coffee mugs and wiggled into their Sorel boots. By the door there was a National Park Service notice: "WARNING," it read, "many visitors have been gored by buffalo. Buffalo can weigh 2,000 pounds and can sprint at 30 mph, three times faster than you can run." One of my fellow students, a retired gentleman, stood beside me and said, "Daniel Boone much admired their voracity." Hard core. We'd obviously been reading the same histories.

The backwoodsman hunted buffalo in the 1760s, at the edge of the known world. "The adventurers broke through the interminable wastes of dim woodland, and stood on the threshold of the beautiful Bluegrass Region of Kentucky; a land of running waters, of groves and glades, of prairies, canebrakes, and stretches of lofty forests," is how Theodore Roosevelt imagined Boone in a paradise, teeming with game. "The shaggy-maned herds of unwieldy buffalo -- the bison as they should be called -- had beaten out broad roads through the forest, and had furrowed the prairies with trails along which they had traveled for countless generations." Roosevelt was a raving romantic about the buffalo.

We loaded the bus with spotting scopes and snowshoes. The skies cleared, and Yellowstone was revealed to me like a secret. The park, established in 1872 as our "great national playground," is in summer-time nature's prettiest parking lot. But in winter, it is hushed and sublime, the wide meadows of sagebrush under snow, surrounded by tightly arranged lodgepole pine, held in frame by the rough peaks of the northern range. We drove the bus over to Slough Creek and found our bison.