"I was there to see the buffalo, though, which are kept in 800 enclosed acres, with a so-called buffalo-proof fence, so I took the road that warned of 'Buffalo on the Road." Well, the road went right through the enclosure, but I saw no buffalo. I looked and I looked. I wondered if somehow I was not worthy. While the terrain was rolling and broken, and some portions were wooded, it still amazed me that such large animals could remain so well-hidden. I drove through once, turned around, and drove through again. Still nothing.

I was disappointed, and I drove down by the bur oaks, down below the charcoal slopes. I sat there for a while, listening to the tree frogs peeping near Walnut Creek, and enjoying the smell of growing sweetgrass somewhere nearby.

Then I thought about how the Old Ones believed that the buffalo could come alive again, by clothing its desiccated bones with a mantle of living flesh. And the thought came to me that this prairie was coming alive in the same way. It had once been killed and the flesh torn away, the soil with its coneflowers and Indian grass, so that the prairie was invisible, nothing left but a sheath of hybrid corn and scattered patches of weeds and scrub. But now the skeleton was again becoming clothed in its old flesh of prairie life --plants, birds, and animals. Like the old stories of the buffalo returning to life, this prairie was returning to life. And somewhere, just over that ridge, unseen as in a great cavern beneath the earth, the buffalo were waiting." (p. 189)