Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
Dr. Ernie Abels was an informative, entertaining instructor. One summer I took a class from the Yellowstone Institute in Yellowstone National Park he taught titled “Large Mammals of Yellowstone.” It was one of the most educational, entertaining weeks I’ve ever spent.
My friend Jim Yager and I were teachers at Shoshoni. In the days before the current funding model was put in place, schools like Shoshoni, Meeteetse, and “mighty” Gillette relied on the lavish local severance taxes provided by oil, gas, and coal.
Shoshoni refused to extend that revenue to teachers’ salaries, but they did pay for summer classes, even ones that involved a week of camping in the outdoors.
I had a 16-foot single-axle camper that I pulled to Yellowstone with my Highway Department yellow 1972 GMC pickup. We camped at one of the campgrounds near the institute office, driving in each morning for the day’s adventures.
We usually think of sport in an arena setting. It can be a field, floor, mat, track or court, that’s the usual image that comes to mind when you say the word sport.
The outdoor world has more than its share of sporting events.
Primitive man, and the not-so-primitive indigenous people that once roamed freely in this little section of paradise, had their own ideas of sport.
The fastest runner, most accurate archer, best spear or atlatl thrower were all determined in sporting contests. Later, these skills provided food, defense, and security to the families of those who excelled at them.
The class that summer was dedicated to studying bison, elk, deer, moose, Rocky Mountain goats, big horn sheep, black bears, and the largest American carnivore, the grizzly.
One morning, we set out to study bison. Ernie described how counting their tail swishes indicated the mood of these giant beasts. A flurry here, a flurry there, and they were content; a different sequence meant you needed to back up before a ton of angry bovine came charging at you at 35 miles per hour.
Ernie explained that if any of the bison, particularly the young males, (isn’t it always the young males regardless of species you have to watch?) displayed aggressive behavior we were to slowly back away, not run and it would deescalate the situation.
Carol was a friendly older gal from Ohio, just taking the class because she loved the outdoors. Jim and I hit it off with her right away. Maybe it was her daily lunch of sardines and onions that told us we’d found a kindred spirit, or maybe just her ornery attitude. Carol had a spotting scope mounted on a rifle stock, adding to her frontier intrigue.
As we stood with her that morning, a young bull bison started to flair his tail, and paw his feet a little aggressively. I leaned over to Carol and said, “If he charges, I’m taking off at full speed.”
“Ernie said you can’t outrun these things,” she said with a tone of disgust.
I used that classic punch line that every outdoorsman uses at least once in similar situations.
“I don’t have to outrun that bull, I just have to outrun you,” I said with a grin.
Carol appreciated the humor.
On the walk back to the institute bus, we passed a field of dry buffalo droppings. The early pioneers in Kansas and Nebraska used these for fuel. The women of the homestead would take the kids out with a sled or wheelbarrow and load up hundreds of these for winter heat.
We had no intention of cooking with them, but boredom overtook us as we walked the mile or so back to the parking lot.
I picked one up, did my best discus approach, and let it fly. Not bad I thought as the buffalo pie caught a gentle breeze and sailed out 30 yards or so.
Jim grabbed one and flung it into the wind. It disintegrated as it hit the ground out in front of us.
Carol was great, she tried it too.
“How do you boys hold these things to get them to sail like that,” she asked.
Carol tried the Frisbee approach, which, as every manure-tossing specialist knows, just doesn’t work.
We showed her the overhand technique, and she had pies sailing along with us.
Not everyone was enchanted by our fecal tossing exhibition.
A couple of gals from New Jersey were in the class in some forlorn attempt to “save the west.” I saw this eastern behavior often, usually in young, idealistic women who came to the Wind River Reservation to “Save the Indian.” My Arapaho, Shoshone, and Lakota buddies always got a kick out of them during their short tenure on the Rez.
These gals were not impressed with us at all. They were constantly tattling on what we were doing to Dr. Abels.
What they didn’t know was that Ernie, Jim, and I shared a few beers after class each night and had hit it off.
One hot afternoon, we watched a big boar grizzly digging up wildflower bulbs when a marmot crossed too close, then disappeared into a pile of rocks. The bear began throwing 100 to 200 pound boulders easily as we could toss an empty can.
After watching this bruin’s feat of strength, we stopped at one of the concessionaires at Mammoth.
Ernie told everyone to go get an ice cream cone or something cold to drink.
Jim and I took it to heart. We bought a case of cold beer.
We usually sat in the back of the bus, so it was easy to open the emergency door and load our liquid gold under the rear seats.
Sure enough, as Ernie sat back down in the driver’s seat, this pair of do-gooders ran up front, pointed at us indignantly, and said, “They brought beer on the bus.”
We just smirked, but Ernie had a different opinion.
“I know what they did,” he opened with a bit of fake disgust, “There better be at least a six-pack left for me when we get back to camp.”
After that, Pollyanna and her twin sister were not enamored with Ernie either.
Ernie had been all over the world studying large mammals. The most dangerous, he said, was easily the Cape buffalo in South Africa.
He relayed a story of cross-species testosterone. Ernie was in his mid-50s when he taught the class. A year or so previously, he was doing blood tests on a herd of semi-tame Cape buffalo with a 20-something graduate student.
“I could walk along the pen with those buffalo bulls and they’d just ignore me, but when my assistant came up, they started snorting, pawing the ground, and were impossible to work with,” Ernie said.
His assistant was still 10-feet tall, and bulletproof as many of us were from our teens to our late 30s.
The guy got a little too close to one of the bulls and ended up high in the air, rolling end over end as the bull caught him from behind and tossed him over the enclosure fence.
“Why was he inside the pen with those buffalo?” we asked.
“He was 25,” Ernie said.
It made sense, at least in the testosterone-filled world of young men and young bulls.
Whether throwing an organic discus, watching an 800-pound bear toss boulders, or challenging something that has a bad attitude and weighs over a ton, it’s all in a day’s work for the sporting challenges of the wilderness.