Several dozen were grazing right beside the road. A ranger was parked nearby, to make sure passers-by didn't get too close. Several calves, a lighter shade of brown compared to their dark, shaggy parents, followed one another playfully through a tangle of bushes. Others suckled. One bull decided to wallow in a dusty spot in the middle of the herd.

Bison, of course, once ruled the North American Plains, roaming in the millions. By the late 19th century, however, they had been driven to near extinction. In the early 1900s, about three-dozen head were purchased from a herd near Fort Pierre, S.D., to re-establish them in the Black Hills, Miller says.

"They brought them over to a small town close to the park, Hermosa, and then ox-carted them over here. Now we have one of the largest publicly owned free-roaming herds," the superintendent says.

The park's official published guide also takes its name from the buffalo: Tatanka. (You may remember the scene in the movie "Dances with Wolves" when Kevin Costner's Lt. John Dunbar and Graham Greene's Kicking Bird "connect" when trying to share English and Lakota words for the animal.)

Down the road we came upon what looked to be a group of small donkeys, mostly mares (or jennys) and foals, a mottled crew in shades of tan, gray and white. Vehicles stopped and the animals eagerly approached for handouts of crackers.

"Those are our burros, the little moochers," a ranger explained a little while later. Their ancestors carried tourists to the top of Harney Peak, according to Tatanka; today's burros roam free, but the creatures are not native to the area.

We stopped at the Peter Norbeck Visitor Center to get a few postcards and our bearings, picked up picnic lunchboxes at the State Game Lodge's restaurant nearby (FYI, the lodge was the "Summer White House" for President Calvin Coolidge in 1927), then headed for the park's enticingly named Wildlife Loop Road.

Besides the buffalo, many other animals were reintroduced as part of the state game preserve that preceded establishment of the state park, Miller says, including elk, pronghorn antelope, mountain goats, bighorn sheep and turkeys.

Every curve of the loop seemed to produce another animal. We saw antelope, solo and does with fawns; a wild turkey; meadowlarks and bluebirds; a white-tailed deer and its fawn; more bison; and a town of frisky prairie dogs in a green but mound-pocked meadow.

Though the skies had turned gray, we headed up the park's high Needles Road — and were caught in a downpour that continued though the granite pinnacles and down to picturesque Sylvan Lake.

The rain kept us from exploring farther on foot — but by then we'd already seen a lot, and left Custer State Park thinking we'd truly experienced the natural beauty and wonders of South Dakota's Black Hills.

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E-mail: rayb@desnews.com