THE SUN LITERARY MAGAZINE: The latest issue features an interview with Jason Baldes on restoring the North American buffalo as a keystone species, Laura Maylene Walter’s fiction piece “Rare Species,” Charles Hood’s essay examining the historical nuances of General Custer’s death, Amy Butcher’s memoir on personal boundary issues titled “Red Light, Green Light,” and a collection of reader-submitted reflections centered on the concept of “Too Much”.

The Healers – Jason Baldes on Restoring the North American Buffalo

Returning the buffalo to its ecological role as a keystone species, bringing back plant and animal biodiversity, is in itself healing. We take care of the buffalo, the buffalo takes care of the land, and both take care of us. By Leath Tonino

Aage eighteen, Jason Baldes, a member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, traveled with his father, a US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, from the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming to the Serengeti Plain of East Africa. In addition to lions and zebras and hyenas, Baldes witnessed the migration of 1.5 million wildebeests—one of the planet’s last remaining examples of a huge population of terrestrial mammals roaming freely over the land. “That was the light bulb moment for me,” he says today, reflecting on his decades of effort as an ecologist and activist. Watching the beautiful and awe-inspiring spectacle, he understood that the mega herd represented a mere fraction of the number of bison—or buffalo, as Baldes prefers to call them—that would have been visible in North America a few short centuries ago, when they numbered in the tens of millions and inhabited the majority of the continent.

The Many Deaths of George Armstrong Custer

In popular tradition General Custer was the last to die, though there is no way to know the final sequence of events. He reportedly had been shot twice: once in the left temple and once just below the heart. ByCharles Hood

The first time US Army general George Armstrong Custer died was on Sunday, June 25, 1876, a centennial year in Anglo-European America. He died in the late afternoon along with 267 other soldiers, civilians, and Native American scouts in the Little Bighorn Valley of Montana. These deaths took place during what are now called the “Indian Wars,” although for most of American history it’s hard to think of a time when there wasn’t an Indian war.

The Seventh Cavalry, which Custer led, had split into multiple columns, and all came under attack, though only Custer’s portion—made up of five out of eleven total companies—was wiped out completely. That outcome was more or less inevitable, given that Custer had misjudged the size of the coalition of Lakota, Dakota, Sioux, and Northern Cheyenne his two-hundred-odd men were facing. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to admit to himself that he was up against a combined force of at least a thousand, and perhaps as many as three or even five thousand, depending on which source you asked. Once the battle started, there was no way Custer and his men would not all be killed. The only question was whether they would die before or after they had used up all of their water and ammunition.

Rare Species

I walked back to my sister’s room and stood in the doorway and listened to her breathe. Maybe some of those seahorse facts weren’t even true. ByLaura Maylene Walter