Keep Your Family Close

The bull would not stop bellowing. He kept at it the whole time we were there, that low sound you feel as much as hear, thrown out over a group of maybe fifteen cows who were giving him no attention whatsoever. The bellowing is the work — it’s how a bull holds a harem together — and he was holding it together whether or not any of them acknowledged it.

Early July, late morning, nothing urgent about any of it. The valley was full of bison that week — this group had split off from a much larger herd not far away — and we watched from a pullout, forty yards or so out.

Black and white was the obvious call once I saw the frame. There was a lot going on and monochrome cut it back to shapes, and the bull’s mane against the pale summer grass is the whole picture; in colour that contrast flattens into brown on yellow and stops mattering.

A calf from that spring stayed close to its mother through all of it, grazing, while he went on saying so.