Smarts are wherever you can find them, right??

Spend enough time in the pasture … a pasture with American bison … and you will become a student of human nature.  Educated on human interaction; human emotion, human behavior.  You can’t help it unless you are immune to observation.  If that becomes the case, I doubt that you will survive on the range very long anyway.  Survival of the no-so-dumbest.

Oh, most ranchers understand.  Whether they actually comprehend their education or take it as just another day … without major incident …you’ll have to ask each.

I learned how to study and judge people, their actions and re-actions by watching bison.  Well, let’s say I learned more about those subjects inside the fence than I ever did in the classroom or courtroom.  Way more.  

It was in the courtroom that the pasture lessons played out their truths.  In watching, listening, observing… and performing, interacting.  It’s not necessarily the similarities of either situation or subject, but rather the patterning and actual predictability that in retrospect showed me what I had come to accept.  

Sure, there are exceptions to and aberrations of any theory, but time and time again, what I observed in the bulls of the herd – old and played out; strong and assertive; newly pulled from mama or still hiding in her “skirts”, proved valuable.  Same with the “women” in the group.  Watching the pecking order; the different methods of mothering; the personalities around the males.  Are we so different or no different than cousins on this rock?   

More than once a cattle raiser/rancher passed on to me that there was some fascination about watching bison that was not the same as watching cattle.  As one elderly statesman of the herd put it, “I can stand in a lot with a thousand head of cows … and I don’t really see them, but put me on the fence watching a bison or two or maybe even a dozen and I am literally mesmerized”.  OK, perhaps it was a bit more colloquial that that .. but the gist and message are there.   Something from the past …. The collective breeding of 10’s of Thousands of years … brings to the front the wisdom of survival.

Think of it in a slightly different way.  Back in the late 1860’s and 70’s, when the great slaughter was taking place on the plains; the easy commercialization of hide for belting, tongues for export and meat for armies and settlers, apparently little thought was given to "smarts" or patterning.  Oh, the hunters certainly paid attention to how the bison acted, but only (apparently) enough to keep bringing them to market.  

Native cultures, on the other hand, observed much more of the "critters".  Sure, they used their movement cycles to keep their "natural markets" within reach, but they also embodied their observations in their drawings, their beliefs, their prayers and much more.  They saw the bison as the center of their living world, rather than the other way around.  And they .. or a vast majority of them... emulated the bison in their human existence. 

So, as is often said, "Too soon old, Too late smart".    I was just lucky enough to have had the opportunity.  I am eternally grateful for all the luck that lead to this learning experience.  To have actually had bison around to observe..

And as my dad said often, "Better to be lucky than smart".  But nothing wrong with some of both, right? 

This guy above?  He was our second herd bull.  All bison but just one to be respected; not feared.  His given name was the Lakota word for "Grandfather" - Tankashala.  But everyone called him "Cecil"

Best wishes always

(the other) Cecil