Bison in a Landscape

A century ago when the land
that was Canada was still raw with
wild nature, they moved as a formidable
force of nature across the prairie
grasslands, a deep and wide carapace
of dark shaggy coats, their hooves
thundering on the landscape
their numbers uncountable
hunted for the sustenance they
provided, their pelts providing
shelter from the winter cold and
raging winds for those who sought
them, the indigenous tribes, the
white trappers, the wolves and the
dreaded wolverines bringing down
vulnerable calves to feed their
ravenous appetites. Those vast herds
no longer thunder through land
now agricultural and pacified, under
the widest sky that nature ever devised.
Yet disparate herds remain, no longer
roaming free to forage and escape
if they can claws and teeth prepared
to ravage their numbers, but within
pastoral landscapes, where they are
bred and raised and shelter under the
searing summer sun in nearby forests
transported from history to the present.