The first thing I saw when I pulled into Tuttle, North Dakota was a corner gas station that looked like it could have been the model for a Norman Rockwell painting. Everything was the way it might have been in 1958: the red and white frame building, the single mechanic's bay, the "bubble gum machine" gas pump, the public bench out front. The elements missing from that idyllic version of American's past were the things that made Rockwell, and perhaps America herself, famous throughout the world. When I drove slowly past Tuttle, North Dakota's only gas station I found no sense of pride, no impression of enterprise, and no hope of prosperity.

Mike Forsberg had begged the use of a house across the quiet street from the gas station from Scott Stephens, Ducks Unlimited's director of conservation for the Dakotas. Scott lived in Bismarck and but his life is ducks. He studies them, he hunts them, he loves them. He purchased the house for a song because it is in the center of Missouri Coteau, perhaps the greatest duck incubator in the world.

I pulled into the unpaved driveway and was not surprised to find Mike gone. The day was waning and, like a vampire drawn to darkness, Mike would be haunting the potholes and swamps in the buttery light of late afternoon. I tossed my bag, books, and notebooks into the spare bedroom and checked out the house. Nothing but duck and Labrador prints on the walls. Waders hanging from hooks on the back porch and decoys and a sneak boat in the garage. There was a small charcoal grill and a note from Mike. "Be back after dark. Start the coals. We got pork chops."

I stood in the yard and stared across at the gas station. I had not caught sight of a living person since I'd gotten to town but the front door of the gas station was open so I strolled across the street without considering the possibility of traffic and walked in. This was not a convenience store. Not and In and Out. Not a Pack and Go. This was a gas station frozen in time and forgotten. The smell of the oil soaked wood floor took me back to my boyhood and I stood savoring the way the light slanted through the frame windows, across the empty shelves, and dissolved in the scratched and worn glass of the counter top. An ancient till waited on the counter for a rare transaction and beside it, a coffee can with an assortment of pens and an old yellow pencil.

I caught Thurman catching a nap on an old, green sofa in the back. He sat up a little disoriented and smiled. "We're open," he said. "What can I do for you?"

Instantly I felt bad. "I didn't come to buy anything but you could tell me about your town."

The fact that I hadn't come to buy didn't seem to bother him. He motioned toward another couch, this one red and set opposite the one he preferred. "What can I tell you about this town?" We started slow and his answers came with something like reluctance. He was in his mid-seventies and had lived his entire life in Tuttle or the surrounding rolling hills of the coteau. He'd driven the school bus, on and off, for decades. The busses had once lined up in front of the school but now there were only a few students. A second layer of consolidations was eminent and he suspected the big brick schoolhouse might be shut down completely soon. There was nothing really new in what he told me. Tuttle was like hundreds of other Great Plains towns. He talked about the four hardware stores that had once been there, the two car dealerships, and the competition between the implment dealers. I thought of all those expensive implements used to alter the coteau - drain the wetlands, plow the flat spots. I took the chance of cussing the government and, from there; it took only seconds to get to Franklin Roosevelt, the "last decent politician."

In the end I think Thurman and I became something like friends and, as I waited for Mike, sipped whisky, and tending to charcoal under a wild Great Plains sunset I thought of all the people I knew that would consider a week in Tuttle, North Dakota a vacation. When a trio of young screech owls appeared in the huge, silent cottonwood above me, I got as wild as the sunset and wondered why we couldn't use the technology that was driving us all crazy it bring people to this place and revitalize it. A fiber-optic cable could open this place up like the hard-surfaced highway had opened it in 1949. But I was dreaming and one of the young screech owls moved his head fluidly and comically back and forth to underline that fact.

The sun was down and there was absolutely no sound, not a light on a street that had once been home to scores of families. The starry sky pressed the stellar cold down on me and the coals radiated heat from below. I thought of the coteau that lay around the enclave of deserted houses and the ducks cruising and chortling the way they have for many centuries. The town of Tuttle was never meant to be an economic hub. Perhaps it was never meant to be at all. The value of this place was the silence itself, the screech owls, and the coteau that surrounded it. Mike was no doubt just crawling from a wet and mucky blind where he had been documenting my thoughts. His touch was gentle on the land, indeed. The lights of his truck would be winding toward me soon. From above they would look like a pair of white snakes slipping along the edge of the potholes, toward a temporary town where I laid pork chops over charcoal as red as horse shoes fresh from the forge.



by Gervase Hittle

A low profile part of our prairie grazing program, having little to do with the romance of building fence, moving the herd on horseback, seeing Curly Bill, the legend, or taking pictures of golden buffalo calves is obtaining a scientific baseline of the vegetation on the ranch to see what exactly is going on with the interactions of the flora, the weather and gazing.

Pat Murphy, an excellent and dedicated botanist and friend of the ranch, who volunteers his time and expertise, has, over the last four years, established nearly two dozen study sites, called transepts, to monitor the plant cultures within the grassland communities. The transects, from which the data are collected annually, consist of a plot of ground fifty meters long by two meters wide. The data include identifying each of the species that the plot contains and calculating the percentage of each of the species within each transect, which is then compared statistically to each of the other transects as well as to itself over the course of time.

The data is gathered in two stages and is relatively simple, if at times a little tedious. In the first stage a reading is taken with a specialized instrument at each meter on either side of the central axis. Stage two requires a close visual inspection and identification of everything that the one-meter increment locations missed. In each transect of fifty meters there are one hundred fixed identification points-at one meter on either side of the central line at each meter along the line. Each transect requires about one and one half hours to gather the data; so we're looking at several days work for two people to cover all of the sites.

We pack in on horseback to many of the sites; so this is pretty much an all day deal for several days. For the past few years Pat and I or Dan saddle horses and GPS our way to each of the transects to collect the data. Usually we also establish a few new sites selected by careful consideration of aerial photographs and then by on-site inspection. Site selection attempts to incorporate all of the diversity of grazing areas: riparian zones, high plateau meadows, badlands breaks, and watershed drainage and seeks to include all available species and plant cultures.

We are attempting to learn something scientific about what grazing does to and for grasslands. Obviously, weather plays a part because some species do well in wet years and others do well in dry years. The distribution of seeds by wind, water, and animals is important, as are the survival strategies of plants. For example buffalo frequently love to destroy yucca plants, but young yucca sprout from the root systems of the destroyed older plant. So the prairie is always changing, and we feel that it is our obligation to that prairie no longer to rely simply on anecdotal evaluations of the grazing quality and potential of the grasslands; it is our obligation to do our best to have and to understand scientific data regarding the flow and flux of what transpires on the grassland environment, particularly in relation to the grazing of these lands.

We produce meat from grazing these grasslands; so by extension, our obligation extends to you, our customers and friends.