Nicole Stump

The Ecology of Endings 

I knew I was going to watch a bison die.

Eight days’ notice was just enough time for the knowing to settle under my skin, to echo each time I ate lunch with my colleagues, fed my hens, stepped into the quiet after bedtime. I’d been invited to a harvest at a regenerative ranch in the Texas Hill Country. “Harvest,” not “slaughter.” I carried it in my lungs. 

How do I witness death? An intentional one.

For years, my favorite hobby was avoidance. My marriage had become an ecosystem in collapse, with a soil stripped of nutrients, a depleted landscape devoid of vitality. I could sense the death rattle in the engine of the life I’d so diligently built, knowing if I took only right turns and kept the air conditioning off, maybe I could eke out a few more miles. Eventually, I couldn’t. Collapse is a form of acceptance.

So when the invitation came to witness a bison’s final breath, to see how life cycles through endings, it was an easy, heavy yes. Maybe I needed a death that wasn’t metaphorical. 

The Drive

At sunrise, I climbed into a van of strangers bound for ROAM Ranch, where bison are used to heal overused land. We passed Spec’s and Express Lube, dodged orange barrels of perpetual construction, until the city shifted back into prairie, taller grasses dotted with tufts of golden crownbeard.

Our soundtrack was conversation—who we are, who we’ve been, who we might become. What we’ve learned, like that bison can stand within two minutes of birth and run within seven. They must—born prey, they have a generational muscle memory of fleeing.

In the days prior, I told my neighbor Lynda I was nervous. We stood by the mountain laurel in my driveway for a conversation that sprawled to New Zealand, her grandmother popping out back to grab a hen for dinner, and Lynda’s distant memory of learning how to de-feather between garden beds stacked with more okra than any human could want to endure. My own childhood was sealed in cans–green beans, peaches in light syrup, the metallic tang of factory freshness. My tie to the land was convenience. 

How quickly we’ve disengaged from the cycles that sustain us.

The Lesson of the Land

Miles deep down ranch roads, we gathered in a surreal semi-circle near the smotherweeds as the ranchers told the story of the land. Once industrially overused, tilled without rotation, grazed without rest, the land was written off as unsalvageable.  

Enter: bison. Matriarchal herbivores evolved precisely to nourish and re-nourish the prairie. Their spade-like, cloven hooves break open compacted earth. Their dense fur catches wildflower seeds and scatters them across pastures. When they wallow in the dust, they press those seeds into soil, planting and pollinating, infusing the ground with more life.

Their grazing carves texture into the plain: cropped patches beside untouched swaths, a mosaic of grass heights that invites return. Birds thrive in the varied landscape of their wake—cowbirds, blackbirds, flycatchers, and swallows feast on the insects stirred from soil. Even bison dung is a world, feeding beetles, fertilizing grasses, and building the microbial networks that hold the prairie together. 

Through their weight and waste comes fertility. As vitality returns, grasses root deeper, holding more water, stretching sustenance even through drought, giving dormant streams permission to flow again.

The ground, and all its inhabitants, can breathe. Renew. 

What might happen if we step out of our narratives of destruction, if we press into the soil, open to disturbance, and create the conditions that support a full, diverse life?

The Act of Witness

The chosen bison was a three-year-old bull, born in drought, one of a handful to survive a preventable sickness. His death would feed the soil, feed us.
We passed the rifle cartridge around. The ranchers told us this would not be a moment for I’m sorry, but for thank you.

We watched from the shade of a live oak.

The shot.
The bison dropped.
The collective breath released.

The herd didn’t flee. They jostled, re-ordering their world. Asserting that they were not so vulnerable. 

Survival is not the same as vitality.

The ground darkened where the blood met soil. A promise, a return to earth. 

My mind tried to find a frame: the bison as crucifix, Achilles-held, a flash of poetry from undergrad, the strange ways we metabolize awe. How to fit this into the world I knew? How to not look away, not escape from witnessing this shift, this sacrifice. 
The bison’s blood tasted like grass, faintly salty, almost clean. 

The Work of Community

Back at the harvest site, the field turned tactile. The hide folded skin-to-skin. The stainless-steel table held tail and hoof. The body rendered from whole to parts.

The anatomy of it felt familiar: the web of connective tissue, the veined lattice of life. I thought of the hospital room half a dozen years ago—my daughter’s placenta in a tray, her body newly breathing air. The things inside us, loosely situated and miraculous.
Here was the communal work, lined with bee balm and mesquite. A re-learning of how to feed from the land, how to nourish and be nourished, how to provide and be provided for. 

We passed around the heart, smooth and heavy. A rancher breathed into the bison’s lungs, reanimating them to full bloom. I tasted raw liver dusted with pink sea salt, heart tartare on sourdough. I didn’t look away.

The Aftermath

Bison followed me through the days afterward—a giclée in my dentist’s office, a threadbare stuffed animal at school drop-off, a fine-lined tattoo on a man’s calf at the gym. 

What happens when we stop numbing and look closely at what’s hidden? When we let curiosity replace avoidance? When we root exactly where we are.
What level of disturbance is required for vitality? How much trampling must a life endure before what’s buried comes to light? How can we find regeneration in a depleted landscape.

The work now is to tend what remains. To give purpose to what we can, to compost what’s overused, to make room for what’s next.

How to stay soft in a hard world, hard in a soft life.

How to let go with a mouthful of favorite food, under the shade of an oak, surrounded by community.

How not to look away.

How to be grateful in a finite, fleeting life.