When you look into the eyes of a bison, you are looking into the history of North America.

It’s a story of greed, loss, and tragedy.

There are times when I see bison walking on the ranch in a snowstorm or on a cloudy day, and the way they slowly walk — with their big humps and their heads hanging down — it looks to me at times like they carry this heaviness with them to this day.

That a deep melancholy is now engrained in the DNA of bison.

When I see this on the ranch, I almost want to say to them, “I’m so sorry — we should have known better.”

But their story is also a comeback story of survival, endurance, and restoration.

And when you see young calves get a case of the “zoomies” in the spring and start ripping circles around their moms, you can physically feel their joy.

The duality of bison, I guess.

In the second half of the 1800s, we pushed bison to the brink of extinction.

And I’m talking right to the edge of the cliff with the tips of their black hooves dangling off the edge — from tens of millions of bison in North America down to a few hundred animals.

It got so dire at one point that the federal government assumed bison were going to go extinct, and it sent a few folks to Montana to kill some of the remaining bison to put them in a museum back in DC so we could show future generations that this animal once roamed the continent.

But, remarkably, bison survived, bison endured, and they’re still here.

(The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in DC currently has an amazing exhibit on the story of the bison, and portions of the short film that continuously runs at the Smithsonian was filmed here on the ranch.)

In 2016 the bison became America’s national mammal, and the first Saturday of November is now National Bison Day.

I’ve devoted my professional life to this animal, and I’ve been working on bison conservation since January 2009.

And all of these years later, I find myself more fascinated by bison today than I have ever been.

The more you get to know them, the more curious you become.

One of my favorite things about North Bridger Bison is that I will be continuously learning — about bison, land, birds, plants, history, etc. — until the day I die.

Ultimately, I’m just damn glad they’re still here — I can’t imagine North America without bison — and I’m thrilled that our family gets to be part of the bison restoration story.

So here’s to the biggest badass in North America.

The ultimate survivor, whose eyes show us how destructive we human animals can be — and also reminds us of our capacity to learn from our sins of the past and right our historical wrongs.

The bison story is not over, and several chapters are actively being written today.

Let us never forget the past.

And let us never stop making tomorrow better than today.

Happy National Bison Day.