you would step on a patch of dirt where no human had previously placed a meandering foot. The view around the corner on a hiking trail was visible to you only as a reward for your efforts, and not to millions of people simultaneously through real-time satellite imagery, Google Earth, or a strategically placed solar-powered webcam.
Now, after spending a large portion of my life traveling in remote parts of the Great Plains, when I find a prairie dog town without black-footed ferrets it is hard not to think about what used to be or perhaps could be again. Similar to the finest pieces of art in a museum, to me, ferrets are that rare piece of the ecosystem puzzle that not only makes the prairie more noteworthy, but more complex and beautiful. Not only because ferrets are a unique trademark of the plains, but also because they represent a long history of struggle to save them from extinction and restore them to their prairie home. It is this past that makes any patch of land a ferret now occupies a little more memorable and special, for that land has regained a sense of being more complete and wild, a wildness that existed before, and can exist now only with gentle human intervention.
In this way, black-footed ferrets represent the wild heart of the Great Plains in an increasingly modern and civilized age. The question that remains unanswered is whether people will tolerate ferrets and their prey and allow them to recover—whether society increasingly finds value in reviving and rewilding the Great Plains.
CHAPTER 1
Pleistocene to Anthropocene
The true West is defined not by time zones, but by geology, soil, and water. By grasses and sedges, wildlife and openness. Driving west across South Dakota on Interstate 90, as I cross the Missouri River at Chamberlain, the land changes from flat agricultural fields to rolling native prairies. Irrigated, domesticated green gives way to cattle pasture that remains a natural brown on pitches and breaks too steep to plow. I breathe deeply to take in the smell of grasslands. Despite spending an entire day in them driving up from Kansas City, I finally feel the sense of entering into the Great Plains.
This is a land of unfolding views, where days are not numbered in the mind but remembered for the weather, the clarity of the sky, the heat of the sun, and the strength of the wind. Today was a sixty-mile-view day limited only by the curvature of the Earth. I pass the interstate towns of Murdo, Kadoka, Cactus Flats, and Wall, with gas station and hotel economies sustained by the needs of travelers. Other small towns just out of view of the interstate or without exit ramps are abandoned and desiccated.
At seventy miles an hour, interstate thoughts are quick. They pass faster than mile markers and are as easily forgotten. Traveling at this speed, everything looks similar, flat, like the parallel lines on the road. But if you take time to slow down, you see that the plains are far from static and monotone, and if you stop for a while, the land changes. Live here for a year and you will appreciate the seasonal cycles of winter and summer and the temperamental periods in between. The dryness and wind that dominate the land keep vegetation low to the ground and flexible. It is ready to sprout with a spring rain, early to reproduce, and then quickly senesce to a gentle brown for the next nine months of the year.
FIGURE 1. American avocet (Recurvirostra americana) on the edge of a prairie pothole wetland in South Dakota.
Where there is water on the plains, there is intense life and color. Find a pond in midsummer and you will have a pair of marbled godwits swoop down on you with four-inch bills and eight-inch legs, defending their nest. Hear a hummingbird-sized marsh wren singing, more melodious than the nightingale and more wild, with white eyebrows and upturned tail. See black-necked stilts sparring with American avocets on the marsh edge. Hear the whimpering of a Wilson’s phalarope as you move past her nest. See a pair of competitive male yellow-headed blackbirds perching on the small yellow blooms of sweet clover. In a nearby cottonwood tree, northern orioles and yellow warblers will flash their colors as they hang and lunge for insects. There may be house wrens nesting in a rotted-out knot of a tree branch and flickers and downy woodpeckers poking and prodding in its pale, deeply creviced bark. In the willows, evening grosbeaks and yellow-breasted chats may be moving and calling to whoever will listen.
Away from the rare river, stream, or pond, the land of the Great Plains is best described by soil and distance from the Rocky Mountains. The rain shadow of the Rockies causes waves of prairie ecotypes: shortgrass, mixed-grass, and tallgrass. Farthest west, the sagebrush-dominated high plains of shortgrass prairie receive as little as ten inches of rain a year, too dry for trees but ideal for grasses that pierce the earth to hold down soil with minute shallow root hairs that can grow sixty miles a day. An irrigated hay field can exhale five hundred tons of water a day, but the economical native grasses of the prairie are adapted to the cycle of water conservation, timing their growth and reproduction to the seasons.
I follow the interstate west over the gradual rise of the Black Hills and enter Wyoming. Passing through the gas and coal mining city of Gillette, where a boom in natural gas production has caused a Grapes-of-Wrath style migration of workers from small towns in the Midwest and beyond. Streets are crowded with families who drive new trucks and SUVs but live in shared trailer homes—temporary homes for people who are flush with money from the energy fields but have to wait for construction to catch up with the influx of immigrants. Outside of town, new roads branch out to gas wells in all directions, harshly scraped by bulldozers, looking like varicose veins on the sagebrush steppe.
Continuing west, the snow-capped Big Horn Mountains force me to shoot north to Sheridan. By late afternoon I am across the Montana border into Billings, and get off the interstate to take the smaller route US 87. Now heading due north, I pass through the rolling hills north of Roundup, where my friend Mark is stationed as a state trooper. With so few cars and little to do, he would often pull me over when he recognized my truck, so that he could talk of his latest exploit. Last time it was how the week before he finally got to shoot his sidearm in order to finish off a porcupine, half run over and languishing in the middle of the highway.
North of Roundup, the prairie opens up for a 157-mile stretch, with the next town being Malta, followed shortly thereafter by the Canadian border. The sun is setting, turning the sky to a fading glow that puts shadows on grasses by the edge of the road. Nighthawks come out on their saber wings to pick off insects that are stirred up by the cooling temperatures and waning light along the roadside ditches. Just after dark, I dip down to the Missouri River, cross the Fred Robinson Bridge, and climb up the hill on the other side. Now within the million-acre Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, I take the first dirt road east, driving until I know the highway is out of view, and pull over to spend the night in the cab of my pickup.
FIGURE 2. Mixed-grass prairie homestead in central Montana.
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I awake to cool morning air and a flaming orange and pink sunrise. Fingers cold, but not quite numb. I slept in my faded blue jeans. I trade my hiking boots with bent grommets and knobby Vibram soles for flat-bottomed cowboy boots that are worn to fit, slip on easily, and won’t cake with mud. No traction needed here. A killdeer cries. Sparrow-sized horned larks battle, black tails flapping.
When I step out of the truck, a mixture of western wheatgrass and blue grama crunches under my feet. They are just tufts of dried brown grasses on the surface, but below ground they form a maze of root hairs that teems with mycorrhizal fungi to access nutrients, tap into moisture, and store energy below ground. Root systems have been built and added to over generations so that 75 percent of the prairie’s biomass resides below ground, roots that are lost when the prairie is plowed and turned over for row-crop agriculture, the land losing three-quarters of its living biomass in one fell swoop.
Scientists
