Chapter 15: American Prayer

[Whistle of wind, faint drums and Indians chanting.]

Nature called me awake in the darkness before dawn on Sheep Mountain Table in the Badlands of South Dakota. I wiggled my way out of my sleeping bag and rose to my feet. I stretched my spine and took a deep breath. The cool moist air startled me. I turned and surveyed the hillside. A veil of fog was moving over the land, billowing down from above my head, covering the downslope of the plateau. I breathed again with a rush of appreciation for the forces of nature.

I walked barefooted past the prone bodies of my friends, around the smoldering embers of the campfire, through the gap between the two Tortoise buses, to the edge of the highest cliff in the Badlands. Carried by a steady wind curling up the lip of the wide plateau, a fog bank rolled up out of the canyon like a vertical wave until it broke far above my head in the prevailing wind.

As if falling into a dream, I had stepped into a pocket of clear-air below a twenty-foot-high wall of windborne fog. The tumultuous force of moisture flowing up out of the canyon churned as it crashed in the upper reaches, spreading out above Sheep Mountain Table like frothy water cast upon a beach. The fog settled to the ground ten yards from the edge of the cliff where it thinned out down the slope of the hill like water sinking into sand as it retreated into the sea.

I strode effortlessly alongside the mystical wall of fog in rapt amazement, following the lip of the cliff toward the East. As I walked in the pocket of clear air, I felt like a surfer riding in the tube of a wave. I peeled off a dozen yards away and stood to make water with my back to the wall of fog.

I felt a presence in my chest. Then I looked up, I got the unsettling feeling that I was not alone. I peered into the fog. Someone or something was out there. I could feel it. I was inexplicably drawn forward without fear to the edge of the clear air where the fog started falling back to the ground.

I recognized the shape of a Buffalo partially obscured in the broiling mist. It was standing perfectly still on the hillside facing the cliff farther down along the edge of the canyon. The lone Buffalo stood on the slightly downward slope of Cuny Table with hooves planted in the ancestral earth. I felt compelled to step closer through the zephyr of mist. The fog thinned as I drew near, revealing the broad head and silhouette of a female Buffalo, identical and no less formidable than a full-sized male. She faced into the wind breathing billowing clouds of breath from her nostrils. Her eyes were open, but she did not so much as blink. The Buffalo appeared to be sleeping with her eyes open.

It was still dark in the distance, but I had crossed the veil into a brighter world where celestial light penetrated the atmosphere, as if a new sunrise had breached the horizon of the stratosphere. The other eye had gone partially out of view with the proximity to the Buffalo’s massive head, still some twenty feet off.

“Oh my God!” I spoke out-loud, doubting my own sight. “No way!” Beyond the Buffalo at the center of my vision, another Buffalo stood shrouded in the veil of mist. I fell forward a few more steps, letting my eyes adjust in the distance. The deeper into the fog I walked, the more shapes I could see obscured in the light haze on the hillside below. Spaced at twenty-foot intervals, a pattern of massive Buffalo stood facing North into the wind, spread out across the entire plateau down the slope of Sheep Mountain Table. Visibility was better along the ground farther downhill, partially obscuring Buffalo a hundred strong. All remained motionless, except for the billowing plumes of visible breath wafting in the wind. Somehow, I understood there to be a great herd standing out there in the fog beyond the boundary of my perception.