Crocs, Cowboys and City Slickers, but not if they can be killed. A lion is a lion whether he’s dead or alive, and the same goes for the buffalo: if they could kill and eat us, they would; but they can’t, so their existence is immaterial to us. The buffalo are as alive as a dozing old man; they walk, they eat and, if attacked, they defend themselves with their horns. My interest in the buffalo is not entirely altruistic, however. In 1969, having taken a liking to the animals, I went to stay with them. I rode round the ranch in a jeep, had my picture taken with the buffalo and had my hair cut by a lady who was a buffalo shaman. She cut my hair with a buffalo scimitar and my head became warm like a child’s – just like my father’s when he was taking tea and I would sit next to him. When I returned home, the land in front of the house looked just the same as it had always looked, and it was nice to go in and rest with my head on the pillow, but things weren’t quite the same as before. I tried to cut some wood with the buffalo scimitar, and it would get stuck in the logs; and in the evening, when my host said, “I’ve made a special medicine for your hair,” and gave me a green stick, I would look at it, and my hair would start to rise like a nest. Then my mother would shout for the whole village to gather. The shaman lady would put her medicine on my hair and blow her pipe and make me a buffalo of a man and I would walk around the village, just like a buffalo. But my legs grew shorter every day, as a bullock would. In the morning, I told my mother what had happened. She told me to get up and keep walking, and the bones in my neck would start to shift like the neck of a buffalo – I heard that, really! Buffalo men don’t know how to be afraid, because they are never in danger. They just turn their necks and look back at you, as if to say, “Who do you think you are? You can’t hurt me. I’m big and strong. I can look after myself.” That’s why, in Japan, the Japanese men love the animals so much that when they are frightened, they put them on their lap and start stroking them. Buffalo people aren’t afraid of water because they know that they must live on land, but not water. In the same way, people are not afraid of water when they understand how the world works. They have to drink water when they are thirsty, and when they get older, they know that the water will kill them if it gets into their stomachs. But we white people cannot swim. When the children were small, they could go down to the sea and we would follow them and enjoy the swim. We sat on the water and laughed. We looked down at the water, laughed, and saw the stars in it. The land was on the left side, but it was water all the way. A father and son could sit on the beach and talk while the water was soaking them; that was why we were able to see our faces in it. And I suppose that, when we went in, we didn’t really understand that our insides were changing. At that time, when you got into the sea, you didn’t see anything of what lay on the bottom – except for fish, not fish, but their shadows. Buffalo people can’t see fish, because they don’t live on the surface of the water; they live in trees that hang over it. When you see a fish, you are looking at it in the sky. Even if a fish swims to the surface, it will soon return to the water below. We live on the ground. Our heads stick out of the ground. When we die, we don’t take anything with us. A buffalo man only has to die once, because he goes to sleep and never wakes up. I was born in 1950, after the war. When I was a baby, I could look at a cow or a buffalo from a distance, but my legs didn’t have any bones; I was like a child’s body hanging in the air. Later on, when my legs grew longer, it was as though my skeleton was being pulled out through my shins. My face was getting bigger while my hands kept getting smaller. So I started to cry, and my mother put medicine on me. My mother said, “You’re a buffalo boy, and your father was a buffalo man. When you grow up, you’ll live in a big cave on the river and there will be fish everywhere. When you see an animal, you’ll just start to run, and it will follow you. And even if the river is dry, you can live in the riverbed because you have water inside you.” She was speaking the truth. I really lived like that until I was twenty, but after that I became the head of a family and now my parents are dead. My father used to tell me about my birth as though it was a story: “In my childhood, my parents were poor and they had one small child, who was my brother. I was born ten years after the war, but I don’t remember anything about the war; I just remember my brother. One day my parents killed a big deer, and I saw it for the first time. I was watching the deer from the top of the hill. It had some meat, and that was when my brother was born. It was a very fat buffalo, and it was just lying down, not moving at all. “We had nothing to eat, but my mother took off her hair, tied it in knots with some long grass, and made a doll from it. The next day, when we went to the river, there was a whole herd of buffalo standing there, eating the grass. That was when I saw them for the first time. We went down to the river and they saw us there, but they didn’t say anything. The moment we said anything, they ran away as fast as they could. The day after that, one of them dropped to the ground. I can’t remember whether I had to kill it or if it just died. “We still had nothing to eat, and I gave a grass stem to my brother. He cried and said that he wanted to play; it made my mother very sad. She cried all the time, and he was small but we had to keep him alive. Then I told my brother that we could go and get some food from the buffalo and that we would carry it home on our shoulders. “But it was all grass. No animals would come near me; even birds would run away. When I was a young man, I knew that I was not really like an animal; I understood that the buffalo were the children of the gods, but only when they were young. When they were older, they had to die, because they had forgotten the things of the past. They wouldn’t even look at me as I approached. They would just run away and disappear into the forest. I felt sad, but that was how things were. “When my brother was three or four, he died of hunger. Then my father made another baby, a girl, and one day, when we were lying in the grass and my brother’s body was there, she sat up and looked at me. She didn’t look sad, but I could see that she was frightened. Then she turned back towards the buffalo, and that’s how things were. “When my brother died, my mother turned back to her buffalo tribe. She became just like them, eating grass just like the buffalo did. She no longer looked at me, because she didn’t want to be seen. She used to cry and would cry day after day and that was how we lived our lives: eating and crying. We were always hungry and sad. I used to go to the tree where I kept my buffalo and sit near her, but she never looked up. She became sadder every day.” My father’s wife, my mother, had three children after me. They all were born when the war was over, and they all became little buffalo children. None of them saw their parents again; they were all raised by the buffalo and they lived with them. All three of them disappeared into the forest without saying good-bye to anybody. The next thing we heard was that they had died. My mother wanted me to become a buffalo. She would call to me: “He who once had a father is now a buffalo.” But when I became a man, I didn’t understand this. I wanted to make a home and children; that was why I went away. I was very angry, because I knew that she was the one who had wanted me to live with the buffalo, but now that I was big, she wanted me to go to the forest and hunt and become an animal like my brother. But I didn’t want to be like