Cow Town

I am renting a small slice of Buffalo, WY, with a P.O. Box. I guess that makes Buffalo home, and I haven't really had a home since February.

I did several bird points around the town of Buffalo then drove south to Kaycee, WY, population 250, for today's points. After taking several country roads with an old AM country station playing, I turned down a dirt one with fluffy black free roaming Angus cattle everywhere on BLM land. Almost every cow had a small calf with her, each freshly branded with an "8" on it. I waited for a few cows to leave the spot where I wanted my tent, then set it up in the crazy wind. My tent tumbled away as if it was Russian thistle, and I chased after it. The whole scene would have made a cowboy chuckle if there was a person within miles to witness it. I had to pull out my friend's carved wood bear sculpture from the trunk to keep the tent from flying away, and the tent tried to hover off the ground like a space ship with just the bear keeping it tethered in the center. A few cows passed by and mooed at me, their calves keeping close for protection. Never have I seen such vast grasslands with no human structures in sight, I've only witnessed similar landscapes in the desert where not many people want to live. I went to bed early, a little worried that a bull might find my tent and mistake it for a lovely cow, but slept well in the first warm night in Wyoming.

After counting birds this morning, I went to the small town of Kaycee to mail a book I sold online. The lady with a large belt buckle at the post office suggested the resturant/bar across the street and said I should get a hamburger, even though she confessed she didn't like red meat. I told her she should keep that to herself in this town and she laughed and agreed. I listened to the conversations around me while eating the best burger ever, people were talking about rodeos, branding, and horses. Real cowboys walked in and out with the sound of their spurs going, clink, clink, clink, clink, on the floor. There were horses in the parking lot, and nothing but feed and tack stores in sight. I keep having the old song "Cowtown" going through my head, and popped it into the CD player as I drove just west of the town to my next bird points.