The day the bison came to visit.

[iboats.com]

It was a day in the early '90s. I heard a commotion in the yard in the early morning. Thinking it was my daughter's horses, I ignored it.

Later, I stepped out on my porch with a cuppajoe and beheld three animals along the north fence of my 5-1/2 acre yard. They weren't as tall as the horses but much more weighty, like cattle. I decided that one of my neighbors was missing some cows, so I walked out to the gate at the end of the drive that they had passed and closed it. It was then I noticed that the three critters weren't cattle after all, they were bison!

I walked out toward the bison. They didn't want to have anything to do with me and crowded up against the fence. I decided that they would demolish the fence if I pressed the issue, so I retreated to my porch to study the situation.

Whitt calls itself the Cutting Horse Capital of the World. A cutting horse is trained to separate a calf from its herd, thus "cutting it out". They are nimble and quick. They also require months of training. They are a delight to watch at work. I guessed that one of my neighbors was using wild bison to aid in training his/her cutting horses. It made sense. Wild bison are much more agile and quicker than cattle, and they are more reluctant to cooperate with men on horses.

So I called the Sheriff of my county and inquired if any bison had been reported missing. No luck, but I got some numbers to call. I was on the phone with one of those numbers when she was notified that three bison were, indeed missing. They were newly imported from Colorado just days before. The ranch was only a few miles from The Hideout so I arranged to visit and inform the hands what they were up against in a mission to recover their bison.

It was about noon when I led a procession of vehicles up the road to The Hideout. Barriers were erected to block all exits except the end of my drive. A truck was positioned at the "mouth" of the funnel. All they had to do was get the bison running into the bed of the truck

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What followed was an example of the difficulties in handling bison. They spooked at the approach of the horses, but there wasn't anywhere to run except down the drive, so they took that option until they approached the truck, then they turned individualistic. One turned on the cowboys and loped back to their original position, one tried to vault the fence, but only succeeded in getting tangled in the wire and turning a somersault, landing on her back on the far side of the fence. She took off to the west side of The Hideout, about 1/2 mile away. The third bison crashed into the front of the truck box with a thunderous bang. End of round one.

The three riders had little difficulty rounding up the second bison and herding her into the truck, but bison number three, who got in trouble trying to jump the fence, was long gone. They tried to track her but ran into the place she had successfully jumped the fence on the western border and entered 500 acres of brush.

I was an interested spectator to all of this and got it all with my analog movie camera. I picked up my digital camera just in time to get number three running across my western field. The bison owner told me that I could shoot her if I could find her.

(JB Cornwell writes from "The Hideout" in Whitt, TX, and is also an expert moderator, instructor, and fountain-of-knowledge in the iboats.com Boating Forums, where he may occasionally share a yarn of his own.)