12. A Bison Pancake

IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE I would face mortal danger on this trip. My first, and hopefully, last, near-death experience of this trip came at the horns of the great American bison, a 2,000-lb. beast that is proudly the largest land animal on the continent.

The bison, many claim, is normally a fairly docile creature. But most animals are. Spend a week watching a pride of lions and they will spend ninety-percent of their time yawning at flies.

And the other ten percent of their time killing things.

For a bison, it quietly munches on grass for most of the day, when it is not, itself, lying down, yawning at flies.

But for every ten group of eager wildlife photographers, there will be the odd charge of the bison, and one times out of that ten, there will be a gorging.

Happens every year at the park. Human cars kill about a hundred animals on the road, and bison horns kill a human or two in return.

I knew the danger, and took it as a calculated risk, as I spent much of the afternoon, driving around Yellowstone National Park photographing these bison. I found them on the road in once instance, and tracked my car slowly along its flank to get a few good shots in.

Pulling into a picnic area a few miles down that road I found an entire herd of them quietly nursing their young and looking around, nonplussed by the brilliant colors a fading sun shot across the valley.

I trekked my Hyundai into their midst, an idea that was not exactly motivated by self-preservation to get a couple of good shots of a mother and her calf. The bison looked at my silver carriage without much amusement.

I left their midst without harassment and continued onto the Hayden Valley turnouts.

EVERYTHING THE LIGHT TOUCHES belongs to the bison. You can sit at the turnout and try to count their numbers. I estimated two or three hundred, though I had a hard time keeping count of the dots of beasts across the Yellowstone River (of which Yellowstone Park gets its name.)

Two nurses asked me to take their picture with the bison and I obliged nicely enough. A solitary male lurked in the background, not more than twenty yards from us—less than the distance the park rangers advised us to keep.

But he was just standing there, and though we heard the stories, we figured we were close enough to our cars to make a break for it if events turned hostile.

I snapped their pictures, hauled out my journal and celebrated the freedom of animal and Greek as the valley hemorrhaged an awesome beauty—and the paradox that I could only witness this scene with roads humans had built and fences humans had maintained.

You think too much. Just sit back and enjoy.

After half an hour at the ridge, I turned back on the road to make a campsite by nightfall.

On that road, a caravan had stopped to photograph a group of bison on the North side of the road. Let me explain: take an ice cream cone and flip it upside down. Now, imagine a road that circled the cone, halfway up.

To the left of the road would be the thinner part of the cone, and to the right of the road the flatter part of the cone.

Now, imagine a Hyundai on that road. And a small group of bison on the taller part to the left, separated from the larger group of bison on the fatter part to the right.

These are the ingredients to mortal injury.

I LOWERED MY WINDOW AND STUCK out my camera to get a good shot of the three male bison as, out of nowhere, their docility morphed into territoriality.

The bison, all three of them, started clawing at the ground, like a bull does before it charges.

An RV stood right in front of me. I couldn’t roll forward. But there were no cars behind me.

The bison to my left started grunting.

A car pulled in to block my view. That car, with their passenger taking pictures, stood before me and the bison.

So, it was in order: Bison, Car, Me, Cliff. A cliff that fell down a good ten yards, before, surely, my car would roll over and explode.

The bison’s tension accelerated. In a matter of seconds the two charged at the one, and the one, realizing his imminent defeat, decided against the fight.

The car in front of me hurtled forward and, when, at the last second, the lone bison turned, and with the momentum of a 2,000-lb animal on a slope, barreled towards me.

The bison’s eyes met mine.

A shot of wild panic ran through my balls and yanked the back of my neck.

The bison charged on a collision course into my driver’s side window.

I was sitting in the driver’s seat!

The window was down!

Without another thought, I took my foot off the break and hit the gas.

The bison surged forward.

The car surged forward.

The rear driver’s window was in his sights.

He pulled his head to the right, and the gas lid was in his sights, and stumbled to his right, the rear bumper was in his sights, and tumbled down the southern slope, kicking up dirt in a triangular plume.

Without me knowing, the RV ahead of me had pulled on, giving me just enough space to pass it to the right, and pull into a turnout, and shrieked on the brakes.

Looked into the passenger seat. Just a mess of maps and souvenirs. Nobody saw this with me. Nobody to share it with.

I threw the car in park, and fell out of the driver’s seat, and gripped the floor. My heart was up in my chest. I looked down at the cliff.

If the bison hadn’t succeeded in gorging me, surely the impact would have knocked my car off the cliff. He barely missed me with me shooting forward.

What if I had put the car in park? What if the RV hadn’t pulled up? What if I hesitated for a second?

I looked up. A crowd of onlookers, photographing the bison had just seen what happened.

“Did you see that?” I asked.

A salt-and-pepper grandpa screamed out, “Hell yeah.”

“That bison had it out for me. It was either going to impale me, or knock my car into the ravine.”

“You were going to be a bison pancake!” the old man hollered.

“A bison patty, served rare,” I quipped back.

He laughed with the experience that suggested, in his youth, he had driven a landing boat at D-Day, or fought back the Chinese army on the Korean peninsula: “I thought you were a goner!”

I LOST CONTROL OF MY BREATHING FOR A MOMENT and sat slumped on the pavement, still in my bathing suit from my afternoon’s dip in Jenny Lake.

I lied down on the pavement and looked up into the air. The setting sun was pushing the sky from blue to purple to red.

“What a way to go,” I said to the old man.

“Where you from son?” he asked.

“Queens,” I told him.

“That’s a long way to come to get knocked off a cliff by a bison.”

”Wasn’t exactly in my itinerary,” I confessed.

He helped me off the ground.

“You going to be alright, son? You need some water or something.”

I looked back and the lone bison had made its way back up to his feet and back to the edge of the road. He grunted at his two nemeses playing king of the hill.

“I'm good,” I said to him. “I’ll be fine.”

He patted me on the back and made my way back into the driver’s seat. I grabbed my balls to make sure they were still there. One, two. Had them. My dick, too. All ten fingers.

Ten toes. Two ears. Everything seemed to be in order.

The window was still lowered. And as I pulled out, the old man offered one last bit of advice. “Drive safe, young man!”

“Thanks,” I waved, and pulled out the turnout passed another herd of bison and drove off, carefully and slowly and deliberately before they proved, again, that there is no such thing, as a harmless 2,000-lb animal.