Willow and the Buffalo Storm

A “Mirror of the Sky” vision

Willow paused, her hands stilling in the clear water. A dull, low rumble, like far away thunder, barely perceptible, thudded through her.

She looked down at the surface of the Singing Pool, and her own reflection began to dance. Ripples sloshed around her knees where she’d been kneeling in the shallows.

She looked to the west, where heavy, purpled clouds billowed up to the towering sky, dwarfing the mountains lurking in the shadows. A jagged flash of light sliced through the gathering darkness, and another rumble echoed across the grasslands.

But she knew that it wasn’t the thunder that was making the earth shake.

Her heart pounded, its beat rising in tempo to match the cadence of the approaching hoofbeats.

A yellow-legged bird called out an alarm, and a flurry of white wings blotted out the blue of the sky overhead.

She dropped the handful of reeds and her half-finished basket, and sprung to a crouch.

Her entire body now resonated with the pounding of hooves. Looking towards the horizon, dotted with pink wildflowers, she could see a dark shape spreading and growing, surging across the grasses.

Her nostrils flared. She smelled her own fear mixed with the putrid scent of matted buffalo fur and the clouds of damp dust now wafting through the warm summer air.

A solitary lizard-bark tree dipped over the rocky shallows, its leaves multiplying in the mirror of the sky. The trunk looked possibly stout enough to hold her. Would it be enough? There were no others of any real height nearby. Jolting to her feet, she ran to the tree on legs shaking so badly that she stumbled and almost fell. She reached up and noticed her fingers, as if they weren’t even her own, trembling.

Grabbing a branch with both hands, she ignored the dig of the bark into her palms. Half-jumping, half-climbing, she swung from the branch and managed to throw a leg over the limb, heaving herself up.

Higher, she climbed, into the foliage. The tree was squat, its arms draping to the ground, its crown barely taller than two men if one stood on the other’s shoulders. But it was all she had.

The sun beat down through dappled, serrated leaves which were tipped with a misty fuzz. Sweat trickled between her shoulder blades and between her breasts.

And then, it was upon her — the buffalo storm.

Massive mounds of muscle, flesh and fur, pressed shoulder to shoulder, surged around her tree like a mad river, angry with the rain, flattening the wildflowers, flooding the banks, charging into the water, churning it to brown, drowning out the mirror of the sky.

Their bellows and their hoofbeats deafened her. She choked on the haze of dust, fighting to breathe through the onslaught. The sky tilted in front of her and, for a moment, the whole world shimmered, time stilling, shifting, stopping.

Then, it was as if she was on the other side of that mirror, looking through. But what she saw could not be real.

The Singing Pool was now shallow and coated with a slick sheen, like a rainbow spreading across the water. And rumpled sheets of what looked like pale birch bark, but wasn’t, bobbed in the shallows, gathering in bunches amongst the reeds.

A solitary bird called, a sharp too-hee, but was not answered by another. Willow looked up then, and saw the strangest bird she’d ever seen. It shone, like water reflecting the sun, high, high in the sky. And a trail of cloud streamed behind it, as if it breathed fire.

The sun seemed brighter, beating down in sharp daggers of light, slicing the humid air and scorching the grasses at the water’s edge.

A sense of death and loss overwhelmed her.

Where had the buffalo gone? And the birds? And the cool, clean water?

And then, with a crack of splintering wood, she was back, clinging to a limb about to break free from the mother tree.

The buffalo flood had almost passed her by. The mothers and babies galloped through last, not as fast as the bullish males, but trying to keep up.

The branch groaned beneath her weight again. Gingerly, she scrambled backwards, closer to the trunk. Abruptly, the limb gave way, spilling her to the ground.

She landed on her hands and knees. Blood from her palms, sliced with cuts from clinging so tightly to the rough bark, mixed with the dust.

She froze.

One lone mother and calf, still sloshing through the shallows on the other side of the river, looked back at her and bellowed.

Willow forced every fiber of her being into stillness.

Soft brown eyes, filled with terror, looked deeply into Willow’s own.

Then the mother turned away, toward her baby. And the two of them trotted on, climbing out of the muddy water, up the far bank, and out towards the grasslands.

Willow squeezed her eyes shut.

Breath shivered back into her body.

She did not know what had scared her more — the buffalo storm or the vision she had glimpsed of a world without them.

I hope you enjoyed my musings about a time when buffalo used to run freely through the meadows, grasslands and prairies of America, and about what it would be like to witness a stampede caused by thunder.

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Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, neurophilosopher, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).

Photo and story ©Erika Burkhalter.