The Buffalo: Place 4

There are buffalo on the hillside, penned up so they don’t go roaming around the suburbs, scaring the neighborhood. The kids are less than enchanted, preferring the couple of crazy ducks engaged in some mixed martial duck arts, beak jabbing and wing hooking one another. If one of them learns to kick with those fat little webbed feet, they’d no doubt be the undisputed champion of the game preserve.

Anyway, the buffalo don’t move nearly as much. They just stand there eating grass and sniffing one another. The adults are more impressed than the kids. Probably because the buffalo are more like us, tired. They don’t have a lot to run around for now. Maybe their kids have all grown up. Maybe they’ve been stuck in a dead-end job all their lives. Maybe they’re just lazy. Either way they don’t move. And yes, I’m joking around here, they don’t move because they can’t. They’re stuck inside a chain link fence, which I am sure, if they really wanted to get out they could. Sheer brute force I want to tell them. Just start running. If they really were like us they’d be devising diabolical ways to scale the fence or dig beneath it. Or they would plot their escape the next time the guy with the feed stops by. Or, if it were us we would have figured out a way to get satellite TV pumped into the joint so we wouldn’t miss the Steelers Ravens game on Sunday or the next episode of The Biggest Loser (the buffalo would love that one, though I’m sure they’d prefer the Bills on Sunday).

Not sure why I hadn’t noticed before, but there are turkey jaunting around with the buffalo, grabbed my attention because one of the big beasts actually moved and headed in a turkey’s direction. The turkey, as though he were a little cocky, a little arrogant, spread his tail feathers out in that (word for bird-like) hand-shaped slap-in-the-face look, stopped the hairy giant in his tracks. Guess we know who’s boss around here. Suppose the truth is that the buffalo just don’t care all that much. They don’t need anything more than the smell of one another. And I wonder if we really could be like them. Isn’t that what we really want? When they turn the lights on at the tavern and tell everyone, “you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here,” and we’re looking around one last time to find that one set of eyes that lock onto your own. We’re looking for someone to sniff for the night, someone we might want to go on sniffing for a while. Or when we snap the lights off, after the kids have been read to and tucked in and we curl up next to the person we’ve vowed to curl up to every night, could it not be the way they smell that so often keeps us there? Yes, I think it can. So buffalo, brother, keep on sniffing. I’m with you.

But then I see that cocky turkey again and I think, one last time, if buffalo really were like us, that little son of a bitch would be turning on the rotisserie, rubbed, smoke and golden brown, just in time for kick-off.