Iris pretended not to hear her. It wasn't difficult, the pretending. Her mind was elsewhere.
"And stop moving around so much. Your trampling perfectly good grass."
Iris and her Family had been trampling this particular grass for three days now. This grass didn't taste any different than the grass they had trampled before and she was reasonably sure it going to be pretty much the same when it came time to trample some more.
Iris made a few token chews and then trampled a bit more. She couldn't seem to stand still these days. It wasn't that she wasn't interested in chewing her cud--or any of the other Four Activities that had kept buffalo busy for thousands of years--she just found herself interested in something else. Something she couldn't find herself willing to share with her fellow buffalo. Something...forbidden.
Iris was curious.
Now Iris knew nothing about the human saying that "curiosity killed the cat", but she wouldn't have been surprised by it. The buffalo had a similar saying: "You don't have to be the least curious buffalo, you just have to be less curious than the one trampling next to you." Curiosity just wasn't prized among Iris' people. The proper response to curious things was to do the third of the Activities: Running for Your Life. Rustling in the leaves meant there was a lion over there. Watching small creatures under your feet meant you weren't looking for lions. What was over the next hill? Probably a lion.
Fear was the proper attitude for any self-respecting Buffalo. Fear was what had made the Buffalo strong, kept them going, protected them. Iris didn't have a healthy respect for fear. And because of that, she found herself curious. But curiosity is a curious emotion. It's something one feels, but the feeling shows a humility of knowledge. A desire to know more than one already does. Fear, the normal state of buffalo-ness, is also something one feels. But there's no desire to know more. There is just the desire to run. (Or, for some species, to fight. But not Buffalo.) The only proper response to fear is Running For Your Life. Iris didn't want to Run. She was tired of running. She wanted to Know.
And so it came to be that when Iris and her Herd crested the next hill, they realized that this wasn't just another hill, it was the Last Hill. Specifically, the Last Hill of the Great Expanse that marked the boundary between the Places to Chew Cud and the Place to Avoid at All Costs. The Place to Avoid At All Costs was (humanly speaking for the reader's sake) a town. Just a town. Full of humans who thought buffalo where nice to look while they drank their coffee. Maybe sometimes Awe-inspiring. Maybe sometimes even a kind of almost spiritually reverence-inducing totem. But usually more of something they appreciated seeing out their windows, at least until the next sub-division was built and they no longer had the view. Humans are silly that way.
But Humans were anything but scenery for Iris. She wanted to know more. What did they do in those caves they lived in? Why where they always looking out the holes at them? What were they drinking? Always drinking?
And so Iris did the unthinkable. The unthinkable is always something you do without thinking because if you thought about it you wouldn't have done it. Without thinking, Iris asked a Question. "What are they doing in those caves?" she asked. Out loud. The already pretty quiet Herd became even more silent. The chewing stopped, the grunting ceased. If anything could have been heard at all, it was the grass sighing relief as the Trampling paused. "What do you mean?", her mother replied. "I mean, why do they sit there, drinking that liquid and moving their mouths? Do they chew cud? Are they like us?". This clarification, despite its thoroughness, was met with absolute silence. These were thoughts no one had ever contemplated before. These were thoughts that no buffalo had ever wondered (a word nearly always followed with a shudder). And there is only one response to wonder. FEAR.
No one would ever know which buffalo it was that make the first lunge forward. It's a pointless question anyway. They all knew what to do and they all did exactly what every buffalo always does when faced with the Unknown. They Ran For Their Lives. Everyone. All at once. Humans call it a Stampede. But this is a crude way of seeing it. As if the buffalo had lost control. As if they were participating mindless group-think. For a buffalo, there was no thinking except for group-think. So group-think can't be bad, because there is no other way of thinking. As a group, they thought about how terrifying it was that humans drank liquids seemingly (and therefore: factually) non-stop. They thought about all the water in the whole world would one day pass into and through them. They thought about how the Place to Avoid At All Costs was one hill closer than it was the last time they grazed this area. They thought...well, the thinking ended there because that one buffalo lunged. And they were off.
Normally, Buffalo all Run For Their Lives in the same direction. That's kind of why it works so well. But Iris, of course, was at the moment...curious. So when she Ran, she broke from the group and ran straight down the hill. Away from her family, away from everything she had ever known and directly towards the liquid drinking and occasionally staring humans. Directly for their cave.
No one would notice Iris was going the wrong direction Running for Your Life was not a time for any kind of thinking whatsoever. Even Iris didn't realize she had somehow ran the wrong direction. But once that direction had been chosen, there was not much one could do. Iris was still a buffalo after all. She was curious, yes, but she was also Running for Her Life. And so she ran. And ran. And ran. At least until she reached the wall of the cave.
At some point she realized that things were not going as they usually did. Usually Running for One's Life just deposited one in a safer place. Tired, yes, but not dead. And definitely not in front of a large (what do you even call this thing? A wall? Sure, why not. We're learning all sorts of new things today) ... wall. Because buffalo are not designed for quick turns, she just kept running, right for the wall. Until she actually met the wall. At full speed. Head on.
One can probably imagine the sound of the crash that ensued. The sound of a buffalo the size of a small car running full speed into the wall of a coffee shop. It was loud. But when the dust had settled and everyone had a chance to come to terms with what had happened, Iris found herself looking directly into the "cave" she had wondered about. But now she could do more than see it from a distance. She could see it up close. There were the humans with their mugs full of some liquid that smelled amazing. There were sounds they were making as they drank, almost musical in their back-and-forth sing-song melody. Iris no longer felt fear. She was even more than curious. She was fascinated.
For their parts, the humans were surprisingly cavalier about the whole thing. A lifetime of CGI wonders had made them somewhat numb to things like this--even to what should have been the shocking fact that a buffalo had just run into the side of their coffee shop and rammed her head right through. But its maybe not that surprising as the the coffee was quite good and the conversations they were having were even more attention-grabbing. After a few moments of surprise on the amount of plaster suddenly on the floor, they noted the always-changing decor of the shop and continued their sipping, debating and catching up.
For her part, Iris found herself a bit in shock. She was tired from Running. She still had cud in her mouth. But what she heard was something she had never heard before. The susurration of human conversation. The back and forth of ideas. Jokes. Stories. Life. Oh, and coffee. She had never smelled coffee before, but now that she had she would never want to not smell it. Iris realized suddenly that...she was home. This was the perfect place for a curious buffalo. Safely on the other side of the wall, but just close enough to the humans to satisfy her curiosity. She finally found a place to satisfy her curiosity while not being afraid. Iris was still a buffalo. But she had found something most buffalo (and more humans for that matter) look for their entire lives. The place between curiosity and fear. The place one can want to know without being afraid to know. Iris, standing outside a coffee shop with her head poking through a hole in the wall (as ridiculous as that sounds) was finally...home.
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