Still Life with Water Buffalo

When I look away from my desk, I can see a red barn, a weathered split-rail fence, one green corner of the upper pasture, and the gray stones of a small cemetery. It’s a traditional postcard scene, and appeared at least once on the cover of the L.L. Bean catalog.

This morning a quick movement caught my eye: our Shanghai cat, proceeding up the hill with all due speed, a limp mouse clenched in his teeth. And behind him—four water buffalo, looking as if they had just escaped from a Balinese rice paddy instead of a nearby dairy.


I don’t know anything about the practicalities of raising water buffalo on granite hillsides, but can report that Woodstock Water Buffalo makes real mozzarella and a densely creamy yogurt.

It took three guys holding big sticks to chase the four animals into a trailer, a tricky task that I complicated further by trying to take pictures. From the few words exchanged, I learned that water buffalo are not only headstrong and powerful, but naturally curious and easily distracted. In the end I was instructed to hide behind a truck.

Looking Forward

In mid-month we set out for Maine, leaving Montana as parched as it has ever been in July, the rivers too warm to fish.

We took with us our ice skates and our winter clothes, two bicycles, a turkey call, and a circular saw. Also our noisy, bent-tailed cat, fresh off the plane from China, who had become very much attached to Montana after just a few weeks of mouse hunting in our ungrazed pasture. He mourns his loss daily, hours of low- and high-pitched keening, which reverberates from the car windows like the sufferings of souls in hell.

The warm weather limits our visits to parks, diners, and other roadside attractions, because it is too hot to leave the cat in the car. But we drove through Yellowstone from west to east, and made a quick tour of the boardwalks that surround Fountain Paint Pots and Clepsydra Geyser, where I once taught a writing workshop as the Moran artist-in-residence.

For dinner along Interstate 90, we can recommend the Winchester in Buffalo, Wyoming (117 Highway 16 East, 307-684-8636), which offers good steak dinners and an iconic chicken pot pie, and warn against Emiliano’s in Appleton, Wisconsin (3025 West College Avenue, 920-739-6186), where the linguine was overcooked, the pizza bland, and the salt shaker must have fallen into the lasagna.