Rules: in general, I’m a fan. I tend to follow them, especially in the outdoors and especially in National Parks. They’re there for a reason, both for my safety and that of the landscape I’m there to enjoy. I like to see myself as one of the good ones, an A+ student that’s bound to get a gold star from a passing Ranger. But it turns out, maybe not so much.

One of the things that drew me to spend a winter week in Yellowstone was the quiet. So when I woke up earlier than the rest of my crew, I put on my giant puffy coat and walked out into the dark. We were within the Yellowstone caldera at the dead end of December so the sun didn’t appear until about thirty minutes after it felt like it should. The dawn-is-coming blue had an extended stay.

It was a balmy mid-twenty degree morning and as I walked to Old Faithful, I passed no one. Getting to that particular area is only possible by snowcoach (as luxury as over-snow travel goes, with a heater and a van possessing tires the size of my eight year old), which is understandably off-putting to many visitors.

So, alone at the geyser. Not a ranger or other soul in sight. I closed my eyes (which seems silly, having come all this way to witness something specific and then actively choosing not to see it) and listened to the burbling of the water in its travertine stone container. I took photographs of the steam hissing away into the atmosphere and watched the clouds pinken. Every so often I’d take a few steps to a different vantage point, my shoes squeaking in the kind of snow subjected to the bitter chill of night and a lack of fresh powder. I prefer the crunch of gravel under my feet and there was a field of black cinders fanning towards the visitor’s center that I contemplated moving onto. But would that count as breaking the rules and going off the path? It was evident the entire area had been given up for tourist feet where no plants dared to grow, but I stuck to the squeaky snow and the letter of the law.

I stopped again as the belching geyser hole emitted whiter and denser steam as it had the moments before. I listened again, and thought – huh, it sounds so much like breathing. My mind was off and running with thoughts about the earth taking breaths and how they were different in the winter and how those exhales were so much like…like the way horses sound in the morning. Like air moving through a snout. Huh, I thought again. The geysers sound like they’re breathing through snouts. And then, casting my eyes to the right, I found that it wasn’t the geysers at all.

A bison lay not ten feet from where I was standing, nestled against the elevated ledge of the boardwalk. Even in the morning light it was more than obvious there was a two-ton furry animal *right there* had I bothered to look. There was another one standing a bit further away, munching on grass.

I was entirely too close and it was no one’s fault but my own. I had thought rather highly of my observation skills before that moment, particularly after the previous day’s wildlife watching. I turned and walked quickly but carefully away, trying to remember whether leaving like that triggered the predator instinct of bison like it did in bears? And then remembered that bison were herbivores and they didn’t care about the velocity of my movement because I was not grass and grass does not flee. What they might care about was that I came so damn close, which they certainly had a right to be upset about.

I turned back when I thought I had moved a safe distance: nope. But the creature hadn’t made any move to get up. In fact, it swung its head away and was perhaps contemplating the geothermal features this area was so famous for. Or perhaps thinking about the new year happening the next day. Or maybe wondering just how many more of the jacketed ones were going to pass by.

I could not believe that I had broken the rules – and big ones – so thoroughly. I had been so unaware of my surroundings that I got close enough to almost touch the animals that the park says should not be underestimated. There’s even a rolling loop of video in the Visitor Center of people getting thrown into trees by a charging bison. That I had gotten there due to a state of unawareness was almost worse. It made me one of the bumbling masses, and that’s an ego check I didn’t know I needed.

So I walked away from the bison that I hoped didn’t care about me while also hoping that the rangers didn’t have webcams. I walked away believing there was a good chance I was going to the nature equivalent of the principal’s office.

But I also walked away having heard a wild bison breathe in the winter dawn against a backdrop of steam brought up from the belly of the earth. With a burbling of water made so hot that it defied the laws of physics.

Next time I’ll put my head on a swivel, and not just for the astonishing bits of landscape from the postcards, but also the ones that are living, breathing, and hopefully forgiving of my proximity.