The sun is hot on my face and the breeze is warm and smells of smoke. The air is hazy from any one of several wildfires burning in August of 2017, to date the hottest summer on record in Montana. Fires are our new reality in the West, something I don’t recall as being so much of an issue when I was growing up. I remember the 1977 Pattee Canyon fire near Missoula that burned five homes and made everyone aware that living in the city was no certain defense from being torched by a runaway forest fire. I still see scars from that blaze, 40 years removed, when I hike the area. I think of fire all the time now. I spend most of June through August, even September, dreading every thunderstorm.

All around me the world is brittle and dry. The plains spread out for hundreds, thousands, of miles before me. The sky here, infinite and blue and curving from horizon to horizon, even with the smoky haze, is stupendous. It puts any notion of what I imagine “Big Sky Country” to be, living where I do in a valley ringed by mountains, to shame.

I am standing on the edge of a cliff at the First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park, maybe a dozen miles or so south and slightly west of Great Falls, and I’m sweating. To the west I can see the massive landform known as Square Butte, rising from the plain like a gigantic stone box maybe a score of miles distant. It’s not the only formation in Montana that bears the name, but it is probably the most notable due to its magnificent size and how it dominates the landscape for miles in every direction. As long as people have been here, over thousands of years, anyone standing where I am and turning their head to the right would see it. Other landforms are blue in the distance; more hills and buttes, the Rocky Mountain Front farthest away.

From the vantage point of the cliffs, the land stretching away in all directions is a unique type of beauty. Squares of managed agricultural land mostly, some greener than others. A large farm machine is moving in the distance. Far below a white pickup leaves a rooster-tail of dust as it speeds along one of the rural roads that crisscross the countryside. A squint and one can almost imagine what this view looked like a hundred, a thousand years ago, but even this bears only the faintest of resemblances. Before the land was plowed and re-made it would have been far more diverse. Plants and flowers would bloom in wild colors, and the native grasses would wave in the breeze at heights most of us would consider unbelievable, passing through them akin to moving through a modern corn field with towering stalks all but obscuring the sun.

I’m remembering an instance from my old job as a manufacturing consultant, and a site I was visiting in Southern Indiana. The people involved in the project—maybe six or eight of the folks who were employed there, plus me—were gathered in a conference room for lunch. I actually hated when this would happen, because I preferred to get away at midday and decompress for an hour or so, without feeling like I was still “on,” and eat whatever I felt like. But this, what was usually referred to as a “working lunch,” consisted of either a period of excruciating small talk or a relentless project-related interrogation in which pretty much everyone else ate while I answered questions and longed for just fifteen minutes alone to stuff my face.

On this particular occasion sandwiches had been brought in from some local version of a Subway-type place; a big boxfull of little half-sandwiches of various types, with some pickle spears and an assortment of small bags of chips. Everyone had made their selections and was chewing away, when one of the others, a man about my own age, asked me, “Where are you from again? Minnesota?”

“No, Montana.”

“That’s right,” he said. “They’re pretty much right next to each other though, aren’t they? Minnesota and Montana, I mean.”

“No,” I said. “The Dakotas are in the way.”

He nodded, then he gestured toward the sandwich in my hand. “You probably don’t get a lot of that out your way then, huh?”

I glanced at the club sandwich I was eating. My puzzlement must have been obvious. “I mean, what do you guys eat up there?” he said.

I pondered a moment, put my sandwich down and took a sip from a warm can of Sprite. “Well,” I said. “We eat pretty much whatever we can run off a cliff first.”

Several others in the room guffawed.

See what I mean about small talk?

The cliffs I’m standing on really did serve a purpose for procuring food. They extend maybe a half-mile to each side of me. Their face is jagged and rocky, with bushes and plants clinging to the edges and cracks of the rock. The ground below rises and falls so that the height of the fea-ture varies, but there’s nowhere I’m comfortable standing at the edge. Even climbing down carefully I’m not sure I could pull it off without ending up with a broken bone sticking out of one of my limbs.

Depending on who you ask, this place—the Ulm Pishkun, named for the nearby town of Ulm, combined with “Pis'kun," the Blackfeet word that means "deep kettle of blood”—has been used for anywhere between 1,500 and 5,000 years, at least up until horses were reintroduced to Indigenous plains culture around the 18th century or so. Buffalo are fast, ornery, and tough to kill. Before Indians became quick and mobile themselves via the horse, bringing them down was a challenge. So they had to be creative.

Pretty much all the tribes in the area used this place. Archaeological investigation reveals campsites that indicate it was used heavily for centuries and that thousands of bison died here. The bone bed—most simply, a geological layer that includes bone fragments—runs an amazing thirteen feet deep from one end of the cliff face to the other. That’s a lot of dead buffalo, and probably a horrific scene to participate in.

Imagine you’re the person chosen to lead the bison over the cliff. You’re young, strong, and the fastest person in your tribe, or band. You probably begin miles away. Everyone, your entire tribe, maybe several combined, turns out in a big circle to separate a large number of the animals into a single group headed in a common direction. I can only imagine this must have taken some time, and a fair amount of real estate. First you’re the bait to focus the bison’s attention on, then you’re out in front luring them on as their speed picks up. Imagine the dust, and the sound of so many hooves pounding across the plain in your wake. Your friends and family—this is pack hunting, after all, like wolves—are chasing along behind, waving blankets and hides to incite the panic.

Leading this stampede must have been equal parts terrifying and exhilarating. To be fleet across the ground is a joy, and living at the bleeding edge like this, knowing a stumble, let alone a fall, could leave you pulped into the soil, must have been transcendent.

When the ground starts to slope you pick up speed, and you know the critical moment is here. This is the part that gets me. Somehow you would have to go over that rocky edge without launching into space, find a spot to tuck yourself into, then huddle there as masses of shaggy bodies come tumbling over the lip behind you. The chaos at the edge must have been terrible, as the hurtling bison realize their peril, but the weight of momentum behind them does not allow them to escape.

What chaos. What horror.

Broken bones. The screams of the dying. The whoops of your companions below who move among the animals, dispatching the injured (this part had to be incredibly dangerous as well, right?).

Then the cookfires, and the butchering and the rich scent of roasting meat. Flies buzzing. Other wildlife gathering—birds, foxes, coyotes. Wolves, maybe, and large grizzly bears, circling, hoping for a turn at the feast. The ubiquitous smell of blood. It’s everywhere, on everything.

Finally, the celebration, and the honoring that would certainly be bestowed on you for leading, for surviving, this important undertaking. Thousands of pounds of food. Bones for tools, hide for housing and clothing. All materials from an animal that only hours ago was tearing grass up from the plain, chewing it, and swallowing.

There are no statistics, something we seem to love more than anything else in our modern era, that tell us the number of Indians who died during this kind of hunting, but it had to have been significant.

Tell me what is more deeply wild than this? We have largely shoved Indigenous people out of the way in the creation of the American National Park System. These parks are glorious landscapes, but many of their reputations are sullied by their colonialist pedigree. People have always been a part of the wild world, and to shove them—us—aside as something that doesn’t belong is criminal. But here, where evidence remains of the thousand-year struggles of one life form giving way to provide sustenance to another, at the most elemental, primal level, is unmeasurably stirring to me.

It doesn’t matter that I drove here. It doesn’t matter that I can see cars parked below, that people are here, that at any moment my reverie could be interrupted by a tour bus full of retirees draped head-to-toe in Ohio State Buckeyes apparel. Our presence here doesn’t matter to the rattlesnakes that the posted signs warn us about as we traverse the paths around the cliffs. The numerous prairie dogs that inhabit the plains above the monument, the hawks and eagles and vultures never far away. . . to them, we are just part of the world. It is when we try and exert our mastery over everything else in deference to our own convenience, as we always do, that we create problems not just for our fellow creatures, but ultimately for ourselves too.

I like to visit this place to be reminded that at one time, only a blink-of-an-eye ago in the lifetime of our world, we lived close beside everything else in it. We were joined to it, the efforts to find sustenance for ourselves creating sustenance for so many others who gathered and feasted on the fringes of our success. Same way it still works with the hunting cats, the bears, and the wolves and coyotes. Every predator, in fact, feeds others down the line. Most, the ones we haven’t driven to extinction anyway, still do. We don’t anymore, really, not in this part of the world anyway. I feel the lack of that relationship in my blood and bones.

Similarly, I’m also here to reconnect through celebration, in ways not so different from the feasts of the distant past. It is late summer and my People, the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, are holding our annual powwow here, down near the park’s visitor center. The center is maybe a mile downhill from the buffalo jump cliffs themselves. The tribe considers this area sacred, as do many of the neighboring tribes, the Blackfeet in particular. The shared use of this landscape, this resource, and the intermingling of Indigenous people that happened here, these are a perfect example of what precolonial life was like across this vast ocean of grass.

Atop the cliffs I can see people gathering beneath a round framed structure below. The structure provides shade, and the enclosed space in the middle, open to the sky, is for dancing. I feel a surge of emotion toward the tiny figures below. We are all a little lost, most of us anyway, and we are coming together to re-engage with who we are, what we’ve been. It is slow going—we are all just people after all, many of us damaged by generations of trauma—but we make the effort. I make the effort, when the urge to stand apart from it all is just as likely to be present as love. But still, to see people, Indian people, gathered at the base of this particular landform, to celebrate, to dance and drum and be thrilled to be living among friends and family, is beautiful.

I take a breath. I too am part of this, part of them. I wipe the sweat from my brow and take a quick look around me for snakes. Then I follow the trail that leads down the slope, across time, through genocide, and diaspora, and fear and death and now rebirth, to food, to companionship, and to wild, primal life.