Come August in the Osage Hills of Oklahoma, Maximilian sunflowers bloom yellow. Cleansing prescribed fires crackle across grasslands filled with big and little bluestem, Indian grass, and switchgrass. Greater prairie chickens chuckle from the ground; coyotes on the hunt howl. And the rumbles of wild American bison echo day and night, as a herd more than two thousand strong engages in the rituals that will perpetuate their kind—all of it a scene that came perilously close to flickering
