Incident on Loop Trail Road

The first thing you see are the signs warning you of danger.

Danger.

We laugh at the word and drive boldly along still damp pavement, squinting as the bright sun rises slowly over the shattered stones and fractured cliffs. We have seen the mists part on better days, to reveal sights more terrifying than these.

We see a pronghorn. Then another. Before long they graze in twos and more across the forbidding hills, but we fear them not. We seek an other presence. And what is a pronghorn but a few dozen pounds of bouncy fleshy strapped under two horns? We seek a massive presence. And greater numbers.

As we pull up near the crest of a wooded hill, only a moment's effort would have us bounding to the top, to peer out across the hilly lands below, and to scent the air carelessly, tracking, learning, and finally, knowing where our quarry wandered wild and savage along the trails below.

Of course we did no such thing.

We bravely remained in our car and pushed onward.

Sure, we saw signs. Footprints, droppings, stray swatches of hair torn from a passing flank. All these could only mean one thing.

If we had seen them, anyway. Those weren't the kind of signs we saw. We saw stop signs and stuff. Those only mean one thing too. Well, actually, stop signs really mean stop and go again, but they never put the go again on them.

Soon we would understand why.

Well, not really. I still think it's kinda weird, but I digress. Back now into the entrails of danger we went.

And then we saw one. And then another, and then many.

Bison.

And not the effete latte sipping bison you might see around a mall or delicately looking over the list of services at a Korean nail salon. No indeed.

Wild bison.

Well, wild bison that live inside a park without any predators, so that's kinda wild, and anyway they are free range and all that.

So again, wild bison. Lots of them, on each side of the road at first.

Then.

They blocked our path.

A small calf wandered curiously up to the car, and then ominously wandered off again, like some kind of signal to the whole herd.

They pretended they hadn't seen it.

But I had seen it, and I was wary now. I knew there was trouble afoot, or ahoof anyway.

With lightning reflexes and white knuckles I slowly maneuvered the car along. They pretended to ignore me, but I knew it was just a matter of time.

And then this, this ugly mean mass of fur and eager horns holds us with his glittering eye.


This is bad.

Very bad.

This is a male bison, hoping to get lucky with the female at his side.

He is cranky at our intrusion, and also knows in his bones that female bison go mad for males that crack human head.

This is a tight spot. He bellows repeatedly, his grey tongue distended like some foul harbinger of something foul. We ease on past, like those kids in Jurassic Park when they realize that when they stand still the T-Rex can't see them, which was really a pretty stupid plot device, plus we aren't standing still but gliding by in the car.

Exactly like they did.
The air is tense with silence, except for the constant loud bellowing of the aggressive male. He and his would be wench both turn and watch us move on.

Incident avoided.

Heady with success we drive headlong down the road like Daisy and Gatsby himself, flinging shirts and crying. No, wait. Not the shirts and the crying, but still with the carefree ebullience of twin millionaires only days before the bubble burst on Black Thursday. Or Tuesday. I'm not good with names.

We edge slowly past a large docile male walking along the road, just outside of Anne's window.

He becomes, in a matter of moments, remarkably less docile.

And probably not even moments. This guy was good - I'm thinking maybe three moments, possibly even two.

He swung in front of us, big, mean and ugly.

He crossed the road and moved aggressively towards, on my side of the road now. What had only seemed like an amusing encounter while he remained on Anne's side of the road now became alarmingly distressful.

Thinking only of the animal's safety, for who knows what I am capable when my blood is up, I sought to go forward, but the way was blocked by the others.

Of course.

I should have recognized their plan, and too late I saw the trap sprung.

But there was more to me than they realized, and I put the car in reverse.

Of course, no matter how terrorized, there's always time for a picture, and I took the one below with one hand, while I controlled the madly reversing car with the other.



I laughed at the danger.

Anne mistook my laughter for whimpering, but I can now assure her it was only the confident, heady laughter of a warior who knows he faces destiny, and he alone can determine his fate.

Or maybe Anne could, if she could scare the thing off.

I reversed, and stopped a good ways off.

But the thing came on.

So I reversed again.

It followed.

I was rapidly running out of room. Others now blocked my retreat.

Which was just as well, for now that I had lured him forward I was ready to surge ahead in a wild, reckless assault that would settle the day once and for all.

And there he stood, glaring at me.

He came forward, and like they say in so many stories of ancient valor, he edged to one side as he approached, and left me daylight on one side.

I moved the car forward, and he seemed by now to have forgotten just what it was he was after, and ambled after some other bison.

As I pressed past him now, onward, ever forward, to... to ...

To Victory!