Hump Day

HumpDay2562Buffalo bull – Soda Butte – Yellowstone     click to enlarge

I rarely wait for images to happen. Let me rephrase that, I rarely wait for imagined images to happen. Now if I’m shooting a grizzly and he’s just laying there not doing anything I’ll wait all day for him to wake his lazy butt up and do something. Bird in the hand kind of thing. But to go somewhere and think, I bet a buffalo bull will walk by this spot and line up perfectly with the other shapes in the image, well, I don’t do that.

But on this day I stopped because there was a snow squall moving through the Lamar valley out near Soda Butte and I wanted to get a shot of it. I noticed that the Soda butte formation lined up with the mountain in the background and I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if a buffalo bull walked by and all three humps lined up.

As luck would have it there were buffalo in the background but they were way off and it didn’t look like anything was going to happen so I began packing up. Then I noticed that a few were starting to move my way. Then some more. I thought no way. There isn’t a chance that they were going to walk clear over here and then line up. That only happens in movies and the occasional blog posting.

But soon that’s exactly what happened. Only the ones that walked in the right place were small cows and yearlings, the big bulls seemed to understand what I wanted so they immediately took an alternate route, never coming closer that a hundred yards of the spot. Buffalo after buffalo walked by perfectly aligned but the shot I wanted was of one of the big bulls with his massive hump placed directly in front of Soda butte and the mountain behind so the three humps as it were, lined up for the image I wanted.

To shorten the story because I know you’ve got more important things to do, finally, finally after waiting through at least three different herds I was about to give up. I began tearing down and packing up again when I noticed this one last bull making his way towards me. Just slightly below the Soda butte formation is a steep rise they needed to climb if they were going to walk in front of the rock formation, and at that point there was a fork in the trail. If you took one side of the fork, the right side, they walked in front of Soda butte and if you took the other, the wrong side, they walked around behind me and had no chance of being in the shot. All the cows and calves had taken the ‘right’ fork, the bulls, everyone of them, had taken the ‘wrong’ fork. This is nature’s response to the “best laid plans of mice and men, oft time go awry* ” line used by everyone from Burns and Steinbeck and now the buffalo, to educate you about the futility of trying to influence Nature.

The bull stopped at the fork and seemed to consider things for several moments then took the right fork of the trail that put him exactly where he needed to be. Out of a couple of hundred buffalo that walked past me that afternoon he was the only bull to walk where he needed to and in doing so, present this image to me. I have a plaque in my office commemorating the event and I have placed him in my will. It only took 4½ hours of frustration to get exactly two images of him in the perfect place. This is why I don’t wait for imagined images. I just got sucked in to the situation, kind of like playing the dollar slots in Vegas. You know it’s going to hit with the next dollar and you play until you’re hitchhiking home.

4½ hours and two images. I guess it was time well spent, getting snowed on, feet and hands freezing, taking the buffalo’s name in vain because they wouldn’t do what I wanted them to, torn between walking away and giving it that last shot, so to speak, but I’m glad I stayed. This is one of my favorite images. I hope you enjoy it as well.

* I know that the original phrase is “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley ” as used in the original Robert Burns poem, but there are only three people in the western speaking world that know what the hell “Gang aft agley” means and I’m not one of them. So I used the more familiar usage.