buffalo dreams

Have you tasted buffalo meat? Have you tasted hump or tongue, or bitten into fresh raw liver sprinkled with gall juice? Have you read Josiah Gregg, Ruxton, or Maximillian Wied, and other early travelers? I someday wish to partake of the native American sacrament of early spring -- raw liver of buffalo sprinkled with gall. As I eat, I will quiet my mind, and let the subconscious toy with the learned, seeking new perspectives.

One evening I camped near the Muleshoe Wildlife Refuge. I watched 100,000 cranes leave their night roost, then for hours roamed the sacaton prairie looking for prairie chickens. Prairie chickens are even more secretive than turkeys- and it always amazes me how such large birds can be so invisible. As the afternoon shadows lengthened I saw a "spirit buffalo". It is not too hard to do so; nap and read during the afternoon, then lean against an alkali sacaton tussock, and idly stare through their four-foot tall panicles, and let the eyes unfocus. New shapes appear - grass clumps can then become buffalo, if you do not try at all.

That night, as the temperature neared freezing, my dreams sought to awaken me, to make me pull a tarp over my light sleeping bag, to keep the chill wind from goosepimpled skin. I was dreaming I was a buffalo. Dreams rarely change the dreamer’s persona, but this was the continuation of a transformation tale I had made up earlier that evening.

The tale talked of buffalo medicine, the power of the plains Indians to know how to set fire to the grass to turn it green, in hopes the buffalo would soon find it. I told of how the person with the power would don a buffalo calfskin to gambol within the heart of a herd. In pre horse days, the faux-calf could trick the herd into plunging over a cliff in reaction to other tribesmen suddenly appearing with noisemakers and waving blankets.

I recounted the hours of observation and training such a person had to undergo to learn how to act like a buffalo calf. I ended the tale with a reference to that person’s vision quest. After four days and nights of no food or sleep a person on a vision quest would hallucinate, and within the hallucination would experience deep empathy with some animal. In this story I used a young woman as the central figure, since it was a story for one of my goddaughters, who had just reached puberty.

Buffalo ranged in clans, in extended matriarchal family groups. Sexually mature bulls ranged in their own small bunches. During the October mating season bulls claimed a group of cows and their young. Great fights would occur as the bulls fought for dominance. Losers stayed near, hoping to luck out and mate when the toughest bull was asleep or very tired.

I dreamed I was a yearling, not sexually mature, still safe within the matriarchal clan. My cousins and I played king-on-the-hill, butted yuccas, and jumped off a steep bank into shallow water recklessly. We could hear the grunts of our mothers fussing at our younger siblings, born this year.

Our complete clan had just run for fun, an unpanicked chase from one choice area of grass to another near the playa where the cranes roosted. One old female, long-ago blinded by fire, rolled in the mud at the edge of the water, coating her worn coat against the fall mosquito swarm. Several of the cows had drunk their fill, and were almost asleep on their feet.

We could see another clan plodding to water in single file. The bulls had not started their rutting, but there was the hint of the beginnings of tension. Bulls weigh up to twice as much as the cows. During their time with the clan we yearlings would stay well out of the way, forming a mock coterie of not-yet bulls. We watched and marveled at the behaviors beginning to occur. Our mothers would chase us away next July, at calving time.

A rattlesnake, sunning itself before beginning the slow drift back to the winter den in the walls of the arroyo leading to the playa, rattled a warning at me. I stopped, then delicately stepped around it. Prairie rattlers almost never strike, unless stepped on and hurt, but do put up a fearful bluff. By watching it, and not where I stepped I almost stepped on another, and at its strike I panicked and ran.

My cousins panicked as well, and in our flight over a ridge panicked yet another clan coming to water. We all ran. And ran and ran and ran. After running for several minutes, I was so tired I woke up.

As I woke up I smelled the water on the wind, and was thinking, “ I can return to the safety of the clan”. But I was human, and did not have the safety of the clan, so I had to pull the tarp over me, and even under me before the chill faded.

A coyote barked nervously, displeased with moonset. The coyotes speak Comanche, so say my goddaughters, and by doing so, keep their spirit alive. Animals can become symbols, enriching the psychic landscape. The buffalo prairie is long gone, but its spirit remains as long as we tell its stories.