The buffalo cow was an older animal, but healthy as far as Dick Wildes knew. She'd given birth July 1 at Summerseat, the St. Mary's County, Md., farm on which Dick keeps about a dozen bison. She nursed her male calf for three days and then, on the Fourth of July, she lay down and didn't get up.
“Something just took her away in a hurry,” Dick says. A heart attack maybe, or a stroke.
The odd thing was, the other buffaloes came up to her one by one, as if paying their last respects. “I’d never seen that before,” Dick says. When he dragged her into the woods to bury her, the other bison followed in a single-file line, like a funeral procession.
Now there was the calf to deal with. Dick had a decision to make: the bottle or the bullet.
“I always said I’d never bottle-feed a buffalo,” he says as we stand beside a weathered barn.
But here is Dick two months later, a 200-pound buffalo calf rubbing its incipient horn nubs against his thigh and licking his hand and elbow with a black, sandpapery tongue. Here is Indy, the orphaned buffalo of Summerseat Farm.
Dick is 73, with strawberry hair going to gray and a close-cropped beard. He used to run a commercial printing business in Southern Maryland and raised cattle on the side. On a trip to Colorado 35 years ago, he encountered bison — or buffaloes, as most people call them — and was smitten. He’s been raising them ever since, at Summerseat and his own farm in nearby Hollywood, Md., where he keeps an additional 15.
“They’re just majestic animals,” he says. With their broad, shaggy shoulders, narrow hips and shiny horns, they are American icons.
And, to be honest, Dick says, bison are easier to raise than cattle. They don’t need a barn, preferring to be outside. They don’t need grain, though Dick gives them a bit. They graze on pasture, foraging for all sorts of plants. They’re resistant to disease. And they produce a tasty meat that’s high in protein and low in fat.
Until Indy — his full name is “Independence,” for the day his mother died — Dick had never hand-raised a calf. Too hard, requiring six feedings a day at first, from morning till night. And too dangerous.
Bison aren’t like cows. They’re independent. They don’t particularly like people. And even when young, they don’t know their own size or their own strength.
You can’t herd them. And forget dogs. “They don’t like canines,” Dick says. “I guess it’s the wolf instinct.”
Then there’s Indy, who gambols around like a large Labrador puppy.
“He thinks he’s people,” Dick says.
The recorded history of Summerseat Farm dates to 1678. It's owned by a nonprofit organization now and can be rented for weddings. It's a destination for school field trips. There's an open house the first Sunday of every month, through October, and a Halloween hay ride Oct. 17. (For information, visit summerseat.org.)
Volunteers care for Summerseat's diverse menagerie: sheep, goats, rabbits, donkeys . . . . There are pigs, including Bacon, Pickles and Jimmy Dean, who, Dick says, someone paid $1,000 for in the belief that he was a "micro mini" potbellied pig. It soon became clear there was nothing micro or mini about Jimmy Dean. (Wal-Mart donates unsold produce to help feed the critters.)
They don’t bother counting the chickens at Summerseat, so numerous are they. Their gentle clucking is the soundtrack of the farm, punctuated by the raucous cries of showboating roosters. Even louder are the geese, three of which waddle around imperiously.
You can’t get too sentimental when you earn your money raising animals that end up on dining-room tables. Dick typically processes his buffaloes before they turn 30 months old. What will happen with Indy, I ask.
“He won’t be slaughtered,” Dick says. “He’ll stay on the farm.”
From across the barnyard we can hear a soft but insistent grunting. It’s Indy, anxious to lay his eyes on Dick, his adopted mom.
Please, Mr. Postman
Deborah Coons of Annapolis points out yet another connection between Elvis Presley and the giant panda: Both have appeared on a 29-cent U.S. postage stamp. The panda's stamp was issued in 1992, Elvis's a year later.
Just think: If the National Zoo names the new cub “Elvis,” the U.S. Postal Service could put him on a stamp and kill two birds with one stone.
Twitter: @johnkelly
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.
