The buffalo campaign, offbeat as it is, has the support of many people living in the area west of the park. Increasingly, these are not cattle ranchers but transplanted suburbanites in expensive new housing developments. Mease's minions offer a free removal service for bison that trample gardens or wreck fences. With the property issue taken care of, many of the transplants actually enjoy having these charismatic megafauna in their midst.

There is no danger that the anti-brucellosis campaign will drive bison to extinction; the Yellowstone herd has already grown back near its 1996 level. Buffalo conservation is in fashion, actually, throughout the West, where the population of bison (the American variety of the buffalo) has increased at a 14 percent annual rate in the past decade.

Still, there is something symbolically appalling about killing buffalo. Perhaps it is the manner in which the animals dumbly accept a bullet to the brain. Or, more likely, the dithering thump of a 2,000-pound beast hitting the ground faintly echoes the 19th century slaughter of 60 million of the beasts, an essential element of the drive to deracinate the Indians and repopulate the Plains with cattle-raising Protestants. Bison bison, hump-shouldered survivor of those campaigns, is the iconic trapezium of the American West. His brown eyes are beady, suspicious and unvanquished. The horns and dark wooly mane are so familiar they could almost be costumes.

"They represent wildness," says Summer Nelson, a veteran activist in the Buffalo Field Campaign. "They are connected with so much -- with the history of public lands, the native wildlife and people and our lack of respect for the land."

The campaigners wax misty about the animals, often describing them in human terms. Mease tells a story about a male buffalo, nicknamed Houdini because of his ability to escape capture, who one day led 13 other bulls around the livestock agents. "Later that day," says Mease, "11 of the bulls walked to within 20 feet of us, stopped and nodded and thanked us for letting them know that the DOL was in town."

The bison understand that Mease is helping them?

"Oh, without a doubt. Every single day they're out of the park we're with them," he says. "We've been known to shepherd them to safe areas."

When federal and state officials try to influence the animals' movement -- sometimes by flying helicopters low and slow behind them -- it is called hazing. When Mease and his merry band do it, they call it shepherding.

In a larger sense, both activities -- the culling of infected animals, and the protection of the animals by radical environmentalists -- are forms of wildlife management, the somewhat oxymoronic activity that is as old as Yellowstone -- which became the first national park in 1872.

As the largest national park in the continental U.S., Yellowstone can be a very wild place. It has thousands of virtually unvisited acres, and an intact ecosystem with large mammals at the top of the food chain. But, historically at least, much of this food chain has been managed by humans in one way or another.

Elk, grizzly bears and wolves, once hunted nearly to extinction, were reintroduced to the park by rangers and now thrive there. The "wild" bison are descendants of the 23 wild stragglers and 21 imports that were herded together in the park's Lamar Valley starting in 1907 -- in response to one of President Theodore Roosevelt's pangs of guilt about the dismemberment of the West.

History would seem to undermine absolutist philosophies of nature in Yellowstone. Yet something about the place invites absolutes, even demands them -- the grandeur of the mountains, the vast meadows and waterfalls and incredible, almost surrealistic geysers, the psychedelic blue hot pots. To quote Edward Abbey, patron saint of the Green paganism, "An increasingly pagan and hedonistic people (thank God!), we are learning finally that the forests and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches."

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