A fifty-degree, windless day in January is something to savor on the Northern Great Plains. So yesterday we saddled up the horses and rode off for the far side of the river - onto the immense expanse of "empty" land that is being pushed hard to be made an official Wilderness Area.

For this particular chunk of land there are all sorts of arguments about access, property rights, and even original intent of the framers of our constitution. The discussion is familiar. The arguments for the preservation of Wilderness and against the preservation of Wilderness apply to innumerable remote areas across America and beyond. I have made a point out of staying out of the debate for a lot of reasons but the main reason for my timidity is the inevitable mushy definition of Wilderness.

I'm not he first to wonder at what is meant by the term and I won't be the last. In fact, I've done some reading on the subject - from John Muir to Steven Pyne - and taught college courses that dealt with Wilderness's slippery brother, Conservation. In my courses I believe I solved the problem of defining conservation by distilling the noun to its verb - Conserve. As soon as I get my students to see this link it is self-apparent that the verb must have an object - Conserve what? Are we talking about pure water, certain grass species, deer, prairie dogs, falcons, mountain lions? Some of the above? All of the above? For Conservation to have meaning we must answer those questions and any mandate to conserve is meaningless without a list of what it is we are trying to conserve.

But wilderness does not have a verb! (The closest one can come is, to wilder-which means to make confused.) Confused yet?

I'll continue to work on the full blown essay on wilderness but for now let me describe what happened on that windless, fifty degree day. A nine-year-old girl rode behind her father on a quarter horse with a slow little walk. Beside them were two Tennessee walking horses that naturally stretched their gait out so that the little girl and her father fell constantly behind. To keep up with the walking horses, every few minutes the quarter horse broke into a not so comfortable trot. We rode along a long black shale cliff and talked about the possibility that a mountain lion might be watching us from above. When the quarter horse broke into his trot the father and daughter would bounce like the inexperienced riders that they were and the little girl would grip her father harder to stay on and safe. Her melodic giggles bounced off that cliff and lit the landscape in a way that I had never noticed in a child before. I could hear a spectrum of human emotion: joy driven by adventure and seasoned with a need for, and confidence in, the security of a father.

I'd bet my life that the giggle would have sounded more common if the ridge would have loomed with ticky-tack houses instead of the silent possibility of a mountain lion.



by Gervase Hittle

After spending a quiet New Year's Eve dinner with Dan and Jill, an early to bed and not so early to rise, and after taking care of my morning chores, I am welcoming this new year by watching a light, misty rain turn slowly and gently into a thin layer of ice covered by a snowfall that actually looks like it could amount to something worthwhile. By that I mean the precipitation might put some much-needed moisture in the ground.

Today is developing into a really lazy day for all of us. We have worked hard for the last few days. Jill has been inventorying and moving boxes of meat. Dan and Erney and I have been building a stretch of fence up at the north place where, unlike here, there are several inches of snow on the ground. In the late afternoon of New Year's Eve day we "got 'er done," and packed up to head home-wet and tired. There was not the usual amount of conversation in the truck amongst us. I guess we were conserving what was left of our energy for the eighty-mile drive home, but mostly we made some half-hearted jokes about "gettin' to old for this stuff." So on New Year's Day we all are making up for it-staying pretty much in our respective abodes: reading, writing, and watching TV or movies.

Our New Year kind of belly-crawled into place, which allowed us to contemplate and inventory what we have done and to attempt to look toward what there is yet to be accomplished. We are always building something: fences, corrals, living quarters, falcon chambers, or ideas. We are constantly trying to figure out how to maintain a quality buffalo herd during this 4-5 year period of drought, which is no simple task. That is why winter grazing on the Forest Service land is critical. Pastures need relief as much as they need moisture. To keep everything in balance we sometimes have to transport some of the herd to the north ranch where there is more moisture and better grazing-the end result is a consistently high quality of meat, for which we expend energy and in which we take a great deal of pride.

So here we are in the ranchers' perennial dilemma of wanting at least sufficient moisture enabling us to maintain a quality herd without having to reduce its ability to produce a viable supply of quality, harvestable animals. So here we are, looking with some uncertainty and lots of optimism (and no real knowledge) at what this new year will afford. So here's to you, folks, partners in our common endeavor. Happy New Year.