ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- He's a cowboy down to his black cowboy boots and blue jeans. Wranglers, naturally, tightened with a large belt buckle.

The image might seem cliche if Leroy J. Lovato didn't come by it so honestly.

He speaks with a humble grin about how he likes to joke that the "J" in his name stands for "John Wayne" -- as if we'd assume anything different.

Lovato is a rancher of a different kind. He tends to 45 buffalo that aren't his. Officially, they belong to Sandia Pueblo, but in truth they belong to the land. It's a sacred kinship, a relationship more to be respected than understood.

Lovato, 52, is caretaker of this buffalo preserve, a 1,000-acre swath of open range running just east of Interstate 25 across from the growing Sandia Resort & Casino. His job is to maintain the sacred connection between American Indians, the buffalo and the land they coexist upon.

Lovato isn't a member of the pueblo. He's not even Indian.

But after five years of tending to their flock, he has developed a respect for the buffalo that runs so deep, he has his own way of describing the ones that die.

"I say they go to buffalo heaven," he says. "It's just a term I use."

This herd of buffalo migrated more recently from Rio Grande Boulevard, where a family had kept them before donating them to the pueblo more than a dozen years ago, Lovato said.

Since then, bison from Nebraska, South Dakota and other parts of New Mexico have joined the herd.

Though he has always lived in Bernalillo, Lovato says he grew up on his father's cattle and horse ranches.

Lovato's is a life that revolves around such things. By day, he works for Sandoval County, assessing the value of livestock and agricultural properties. His work with the pueblo is a part-time job, but one that keeps him where he wants, on horseback, patrolling the rangeland at least three times a week.

It took some time to build a relationship with the buffalo. They're still wild animals, after all, and smarter than the cattle he grew up tending.

"They charged me for a year and a half," he says, walking along ground scattered with hay and buffalo droppings. "They get hot really quick. It's that wild temper that flares up.

"It's that gene pool that's trying to survive."

History explains that instinct.

Through the early 1800s there were anywhere from 20 million to 60 million buffalo in the United States. The number depends on the source doing the estimating, said Mike Fox, interim executive director of the InterTribal Bison Cooperative, a collective of 57 American Indian tribes across 19 states that work to keep buffalo on native lands.

Thanks to westward expansion, less than 1,000 bison remained by the 1890s, though the number today has risen to 350,000, Fox said.

Albuquerque's rampant growth might pose similar threats to the Sandia herd were it not for pueblo borders.

From where he stands at the entrance to the buffalo preserve, Lovato looks south at a wall of expensive homes.

"That's the city," he says. "That's the beginning."

It seems, though, that the growing metropolis and the collection of prehistoric creatures that it neighbors coexist peacefully.

Lovato has names for about half the buffalo. Like Crooked Horns, a name that explains itself.

But while it's a buffalo preserve, about five to eight head are killed each year for tribal use, Lovato said.

Lovato said the meat is eventually distributed among pueblo members, as has been done for centuries, and the hides are preserved using native methods, he said.

It's those traditions that have taught him the importance of the buffalo and, in turn, generated the feelings of reverence he now has for the animal.

One man, a Chippewa who used to reside in Wisconsin, was making a turtle out of leather for his young child. He wanted to fill it with buffalo hair -- a way to always keep the buffalo spirit with his child.

So he arranged a meeting with Lovato to meticulously pick buffalo hair off the fencing that surrounds the preserve. It was a specific endeavor, a search for only the fine, wool-like shoulder hair.

Lovato asked the man if he would clean the hair.

"He said, 'I want it the way nature had it,'" Lovato said.

It's from that spirit that the cowboy's own passion for the buffalo has emerged.

As he leaves the preserve, Lovato points to the five head chosen to leave the herd this year.

He points to the nearest one, a large female staring intently back toward him.

"This one is Short Horns," Lovato says. "She's going to buffalo heaven, too."