I dreamed, now that the motherhood you used to plan against has come, I dreamed it all but softening your nature, so that my phone rang and you asked how I was doing. The morning came brightly pine scented, limned with peeking sunshine and birdsong, twinkling. No thoughts of prior or potential lives could distract me, then, the moment an adventure. Just so, an older bison bull crossed the road ahead of my car, bellowing. As he reached the opposite greenery, the whole width and weight of him flopped into a patch of dust there. Wallowing is too melancholy a word for the rambunctious task the buffalo set himself to. As a dog tosses itself in grass or snow or shit, this ungainly animal ten times the size wriggled, limbs up spine down, to gather dirt into its thick blanket of dark fur. Its legs seemed incongruously thin as they waggled from one side to the other across the giant creature’s tall chest. Nearby the dozens, probably hundreds, of other herd among the hillocks and recesses of field. All the beasts resting and grazing, the broad family completed by the here and there appearances of playful calves marked by the russet coppers of their first ninety days. Among those varyingly large masses of fuzzy browns, the lithe and lightly shaded figures of a family of pronghorn weave. As the breeze rolls over the high grasses, the serenity strikes oceanic; here a buoyant group of smaller ungulates drift amid a leisurely school of bison. I float along. Just down the road, several cars stopped on dirt shoulders, many more stopped directly on the pavement. I wait patiently with my foot on the brake. From his truck in the oncoming lane, out the open window a man is telling the cars ahead of me where to look, and for what. I am clearly uninterested in a full conversation but this driver bellows down toward my car, “It’s a bear.” Deadpan, and drives on. I am still chuckling as I pull up toward another bison bull, lounging boulder large in the near, high grass. I slow down and wink from my window. The buffalo winks back.

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