The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [101]
Although both Ferris and Merrifield—Roosevelt’s ranching partners—were cordial, they were clearly lukewarm about hunting down a tired old buffalo with an aristocratic swell. The two of them wore identical expressions, which read, “Not likely.” In any event, they were busy raising 150 cattle, hoping for a big payday when heifers were sold.
Luckily for Roosevelt, shortly after their arrival at the Maltese Cross Ranch, a hungry bobcat (weighing approximately twenty-five pounds) got loose in the chicken coop, creating havoc and sending feathers flying. All four men raced out of the ranch cabin—an edifice of a story and a half with a high-pitched shingled roof—to ambush the agile predator. The bobcat got away, but the attendant laughing and cursing broke the ice. The initially cold attitude toward Roosevelt dissipated in favor of cowboy camaraderie.41 Still, only when Roosevelt offered to pay did Sylvane and Merrifield grudgingly lend him a mare for his buffalo quest.
Although lonesome Georges were more easily hunted than other Great Plains game like antelope or white-tailed deer, the chase still presented a serious challenge. Far from being a “tame amusement,”42 as Roosevelt put it, a buffalo could turn mean and with a belching snort charge like a mad bull in an unexpected flash. The novelist Thomas Berger accurately noted the inherent danger when he wrote in Little Big Man that “buffalo run a mile in one minute and will stampede on a change of wind.”43 Roosevelt, in his conservation-tinged hunting essays, was somewhat defensive about his compulsion for shooting an endangered species. “It is genuine sport,” he insisted; “it needs skill, marksmanship, and hardihood in the man who follows it, and if he hunts on horseback, it needs also pluck and good riding. It is in no way akin to various forms of so-called sport in vogue in parts of the East, such as killing deer in a lake or by fire hunting, or even by watching at a runaway.”44
III
Roosevelt took a real shine to William Merrifield, later writing in his diary that Merrifield was “a good-looking fellow who shoots and rides beautifully, a reckless, self-confident man.”45 The evening of the bobcat’s attack, Roosevelt slept on the hard clay floor at the one-room Maltese Cross Ranch cabin, insisting on high-minded principle that he’d never stoop so low as to take another man’s bed. Perhaps he wanted to replicate that evening of the buffalo robe three Septembers earlier in the Red River valley. At any rate the gesture was keenly noted by Joe Ferris and Bill Merrifield. Rising at dawn, Roosevelt saddled up his horse (named “Nell” after his brother Elliott), grasped the reins, and trotted south to hunt his buffalo trophy. Jouncing beside him was Joe Ferris, whose horse pulled a wagon full of outback supplies.
For once Roosevelt seemed to be at a loss for words as they followed a creek meandering across a valley tucked between skyscraper rock and curtain wall. The hypnotic landscape was the promised land for anybody afflicted with even a touch of claustrophobia. Nobody has ever visited North Dakota and felt hemmed in. Like all creeks in the Badlands this one ran into the Little Missouri River. If you studied an aerial photograph, the topography looked like random lines on a hand palm or leaf veins squiggling in all directions. There was a trickling creek, it seemed, around every bend. As if living out the dream of an “old regular” or half-breed trapper, Roosevelt experienced in the Badlands the freedom to live without the shackles of the urban world. Windswept plains, unmapped wilds, the howls of hungry coyotes—all this was part of the Badlands experience for Roosevelt.
What Roosevelt had to offer Joe Ferris—and every Dakotan he rode with—was his encyclopedic knowledge of Badlands birds. A particular favorite of his were the nocturnal thrashers. Ferris was no doubt impressed that his hunting partner