Authentic voices #2

Don't ask why, but I was riding in a pickup at the top of New Mexico through about three feet of snow to feed the buffalo at Vermejo Park Ranch, which today belongs to Ted Turner but back then was owned by Pennzoil--which allowed people like my client to use the old land grant for meetings. We were about two hours out when we found the herd. We threw some hay on the ground and then the driver announced that we had to travel on to a different pasture and feed this one buffalo who would be the object of a buffalo hunt in a few days. I asked him what that meant and he said a big game hunter was flying in from Dallas, and he specifically wanted to shoot a buffalo. They were not going to put the whole herd through such an ordeal, so the victim had been chosen and sent to the killing field.

A couple of hours later we came over a rise into a treeless bowl with a frozen pond at the bottom. An old buffalo stood there in the clearing, by the pond, facing into the winter wind. The driver, who was one of the hunting guides, stopped the truck about 100 yards from the animal.

I said, "So on the day of the hunt, he'll be hidden in the woods, right?" "No," said the hunting guide, "He'll be right there. He hasn't moved since we brought him over here." I asked if they would honk the horn, or make wolf sounds, or something, to at least try to make him run. And that's when he told me how it would all go down:

We'll stop the truck right here, just like you and I did. We'll look at the hunter and say, "There's your buffalo." He'll nod and get out and get ready to shoot. If he's a good shot and knows what he's doing, he'll hit him in the heart on the first shot and that'll be the end of it, nice and clean. But...I've yet to see that happen. Most generally, it goes like this. First shot hits the ol' boy in the flank, and he just looks around as if he was bit by a fly or something. Second shot'll get him in the shoulder and stun him a little. Third shot will bring him to his knees. And he'll roll over on the fourth shot and bleed to death. Hunter'll walk up and nudge him with his foot. The boys'll pick him up and in a few weeks the hunter will receive a mounted head for his trophy wall and some bison meat for his freezer.

We drove on down and dropped off some hay, and I watched as we motored away and never saw the buffalo move. I spent the rest of my day making plans with my client, his sales vice president, his chief marketing officer and his chief financial officer, and then the hunting guides came in their vehicles with the big knobby tires and drove us on back to Raton where the company plane was waiting to take us home.