MALTA, Mont. — On a late July day 2,000 miles west of the Bronx, Vaughn Minott, a tall and soft-spoken aspiring biochemist who was born in Jamaica, bounced with five other New York teenagers in the bed of a 4X4 pickup through a Montana bison range as vast as the bright dome of sky above.

The pickup gradually slowed to a halt on the prairie about 100 yards from where the herd grazed. Two woolly bulls smashed heads, grunting like diesel engines and bucking up clouds of alkali dust, and Vaughn and his friends all gasped, hunkering down and pressing binoculars to their eyes. Some had never seen a wild animal bigger than a subway rat. Then Vaughn climbed out of the pickup and began to walk toward the bison.

“It was like that once-in-a-lifetime moment,” said Vaughn, 17, a senior at University Heights High School in the Bronx. “Should you not get out because you’re afraid? Or should you experience it?”

How Vaughan and his pickup truck companions — all of them New York City high school students with an aptitude for science — came to spend time among the bison and the rattlesnakes of the Montana prairie is a story of city meets country, on a landscape resurrected from the annals of history. They were on the American Prairie Reserve for nine days as recipients of grants from Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, an academic program to help low-income students at New York City’s public schools earn college degrees. All six students who traveled to Montana were immigrants or children of immigrants and were set to graduate in 2016. They all hoped to be the first in their immediate families to graduate from college in America, and were on the prairie for experience and insight into their scholastic passions — as well as to observe prairie dogs, dig up dinosaur bones and study bison physiology.