ANTELOPE ISLAND, UTAH — "How do you move a 2,000-pound bison?" a rider on a horse next to me asked. The punch line to this joke: "You don't."
Buffaloes don't herd easily. If pushed too fast, they lower their heads and charge at anyone dumb enough to get in the way.
But that is exactly what we were trying to do -- about 150 riders and me as we trotted across a flat field on Antelope Island in the middle of Utah's Great Salt Lake. Ahead of us, a herd of about 250 bison -- a woolly, snorting blanket of black shoulders and rising dust -- shuffled toward the corrals on the north end of the island. To move the animals, riders whooped like warriors. One rider snapped a bullwhip.
In all the commotion, at least eight riders were thrown to the ground, and one suffered a broken wrist.
Still, that's the kind of excitement that draws riders from across the country to the annual Bison Roundup on Antelope Island, one of the country's few buffalo roundups that allow untrained volunteers to herd these surly 1-ton creatures.
At other roundups -- the most famous takes place every September at Custer State Park in South Dakota -- visitors stand behind fences as professional cowboys do the hard work. But on Antelope Island each fall, any adult with a horse and the $25 admission fee can help herd bison into corrals.
My fascination with buffaloes began as a kid, when I fell in love with the movie "Bless the Beasts and the Children," about a group of misfit boys who sneak away from summer camp to save a herd of buffaloes from certain death during a "canned" hunt. Since then, I've been mesmerized by the sight of brawny bison rumbling across open fields -- a timeless image, like thunder clouds forming or whales breaching the surface of the sea.
I thought I was alone in my buffalo fascination until I arrived on this 28,000-acre island in mid-October and watched a stream of pickup trucks, horse trailers and RVs roll onto a grass field. Some of these fellow bison fanatics traveled as many as 600 miles to spend three days enduring freezing temperatures, choking dust clouds and sore keisters to marvel at this iconic symbol of the American West.
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Even Buffalo Bill Cody had a soft spot for these beasts.
