Scholars estimate that there may have been five or more buffalo wallows per acre on the precolonial Great Plains: as many as 1.5 billion wallows. Many of them have been paved over or built upon or leveled for farmland. But hundreds of millions must still be there, each preserving in its bionetwork particular memories of migrations past. Hundreds of millions of buffalo wallows are narrating tales of yore in continent-scale, precolonial braille. If you read carefully this palimpsest of near-perfect circles, you can imagine the people it implies: the people who had been hunting buffalo for food and clothes and shelter and trade; and the people who came to genocide the hunters. Like a memorial: a remembering of something inimitable and precious, or of something inimitable and precious now broken; of the violence that broke it.
Studying up on the wallows, I came across a website that describes them as “ecological potholes.” I misread: ecological portholes.
IN THE SEVENTIES and eighties, my generation of Soviet girls played a summer game called sekretiki, little secrets. We would scoop out a thumb-sized patch of dirt in a park or a forest, line it with a bright candy wrapper (shiny Mylar foil from a chocolate was considered more valuable than plain paper, even if it still carried the scent of a strawberry caramel), and arrange upon it a handful of little treasures: a buttercup petal, a found sequin, a brightly colored bead. Then we would seal this miniature still life with a flat shard of window glass, which, in turn, we would blanket with leaves and pine needles—the more nondescript, the better. The idea was to forget where you had hidden your little shrine and then to come upon it later by happy accident: it was a way of sending a beautiful message in a bottle to your future self. The game fit my puerile aesthetic; my mother thought it kitsch and creepy and called the game mogilki: little graves. Perhaps she had a point. But the game was more fundamentally flawed: it was delusionary, because of course no six-year-old girl could honestly forget where she had hidden her precious and precise arrangement of treasures, just as we, while we heedlessly ravage the Earth, cannot honestly forget the messages we are sending to our future selves and to our future planet.