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This painting has been on my mind for a very long time. I don’t mean like a couple weeks, but more like 45 years or even longer. In my young married life, we traveled back to South Dakota for vacation and spend time with family and friends. In one of those first years of marriage we went to the Black Hills in South Dakota and visited the State Game Lodge near Custer, SD. It was President Hoover’s summer White House and home to the largest herd of Bison, or buffalo if you prefer, in existence today. They are massive and immensely strong creatures with real bad attitudes that don’t mind taking it out on the tourists who are dumb enough to consider approaching them or trying to drive between them. When impatience for them to cross the road take hold and lo and behold a stroke of genius strikes their mind with the notion “I can drive through them and they won’t mind”! hahahahaha. Seen many cars destroyed around this massive herd and a few tourists tossed into the air and stomped or gored or both here at the State Game Lodge when I lived near here. I was always smart enough having grown up around livestock to keep my distance.

 

My wife and I were married in 1976 shortly before I was released from active duty in the US Air Force. We made regular trips like this one from our new home in South Carolina, where I grew up and my family hailed from, to return to South Dakota. On one such trip in the fall we traveled to South Dakota for a visit and it may have been this same trip to the State Game Lodge for a visit. My father-in-law, Art, loved to hunt and fish, living in a rural state like South Dakota was a way of life. Art had planned an outing to hunt pheasant and prairie partridge with his brand-new son-in-law. Always a huge fall event there in South Dakota. Needless to say, I was a bit nervous as I had never hunted pheasants before and it was my first hunting trip in South Dakota. Not that it was all new to me, as I had lived there for a couple years in the military and grew up hunting quail most of my life in the South. Not without shooting skills myself.

 

Everything went just fine and I only shot one hen getting a little excited in the morning. I’ll fess up and send a check to the South Dakota Department of Natural resources. We had lunch and were going to hit a corn field in the afternoon for partridge. Unlike SC this field did not have to be cut to hunt it and the good old South Dakota corn was taller than me. We had several guys hunting with us with a compliment of bird dogs, but this deep in the corn I rarely caught a glimpse of one run by once in a while and everyone stayed in their own row of corn maintaining our spacing even though we couldn’t see each other.

 

It wasn’t too long and I walked right out the end of that corn field and came face to face with the biggest bull bison I had ever seen before or since and that I ever had occasion to be that close to. When I cleared the corn, he was facing the opposite direction but when I came out of the corn he heard me and whirled around to get me in his sights, immediately lowering his head, he reached out and with his right front hoof and threw about 35 lbs. of dirt behind him and charged directly for me. Of course, I immediately crapped my pants and dropped my gun to aim at his forehead when I realized I only had #5 bird shot shells in my gun. Certain that these would do little more than give him a headache and certain death for me. I didn’t fire because I didn’t think it would do anything but make him madder than he already was. Fortunately, there was a three-strand barbed wire fence between us, which he pretty much pushed down, and I was close enough to see the barbs cut and bloody his massive side, which seemed to enrage him further.

 

While he was busy dancing on the other side of the fence and relying on my understanding and value of the military retreat, I ducked back into the corn making myself scarce and out of his sight. I found it difficult to move as my heart was hammering and had I been older than 25 or so I probably would have had a heart attack. He looked to be every single pound of the maximum average weight on the males of 2200lbs as their range between 1800 to 2200 pounds is not that much variance in weight.

 

Needless to say, he left an everlasting impression on me that has lasted about 45 years or more and will last a lifetime. It was a once in a lifetime encounter and could have been a deadly one. It was an encounter I felt like I needed to have token of my memory of the event as I first saw him so calmly standing in the prairie grass. So, whoever buys the painting will have a good story to go with it. For about 30 years after that day, I had pleasure of hunting regularly with my father-in-law, Art. It too was one of the highlights of my life and I certainly miss him. His journey was separated from ours about a decade ago. Some day soon I’ll paint his portrait too in remembrance of all the good times we had together.  It’s what painting is all about, capturing our emotions on the page and having meaning to us. It’s the reason I am trying to write more about what and why I paint what I do.