American Buffalo

by Steven Rinella

  Right now, we’re sorting through gear, trying to determine how much we can bring. Usually you can pack everything you want in a raft, right down to cases of beer. But this situation is different, because Danny and I are trying to imagine what the raft’s going to look like with eight hundred pounds of buffalo parts in it. It’s highly speculative work. For starters, we don’t really know if we’re going to find a buffalo, let alone how big it will be. Second, we don’t know how much water we’ll have to float the raft in. The air temperature dropped into the teens last night, and the edges of the Klutina are frozen in a skein of ice. Boulders in the middle of the river are capped with frozen splash water, so they look as slick and shiny as greased bowling balls. A few more cold nights like this will set off a chain of events: the glaciers that feed the Copper’s tributaries will slow down in their melting; water levels in the Copper River will drop; more and more rocks and gravel bars will rise above the water’s surface; the raft will drag on the bottom more often; we’ll have to unload the boat to get it unstuck; we’ll start wishing like hell that we hadn’t packed so much gear.

  My brother Danny is particularly in tune to the workings of rivers because he’s a freshwater ecologist with the University of Alaska. He’s coming along because we have an unspoken brotherly tie that says he has to. Our companions, Rafferty and Jessen, are in tune to the doings of rivers because they’re both whitewater enthusiasts. They’re coming along partly because it’s their raft and partly because they’re hoping to get their hands on a bit of free-range organic buffalo meat. I first became aware of Jessen, a hospital administrator, and Rafferty, an environmental activist, while hanging around at backyard barbecues in Anchorage. The town has a thriving community of people in their twenties and thirties who moved to the state looking for wilderness thrills, and these folks get drawn into summertime salmon cookouts like raccoons to garbage. You’ll find out about common acquaintances while talking about getting lost on a mountain, or digging clams, or flipping a boat in a river while hunting caribou. During such conversations, I heard that Jessen once spent ten days holed up in a snow cave during a blizzard on a mountain. I heard about how Rafferty was watching a grizzly bear one day when another grizzly bear came along and killed it and ate its guts. Another time, I heard a story about how the two of them were rafting with some friends when a landslide peeled off a mountain and came ripping down the slope, trees and all. A descending tree limb grabbed a girl’s life jacket and, as my friend described it, “deposited her in the river like an anchor. She just vanished. Then the limb broke, and she came popping back up.” The landslide caused a minor tsunami that beached the raft so far up on the riverbank that they had to drag the boat back down to the water.

  The number of weird things that happen to a person in the wild is directly proportional to how much time that person spends in the wild, and I figured that these would be some useful guys to have around. Danny had met Rafferty a couple times but he’d never hung out with him for that long; he knew Jessen a little bit better, and described him to me as having an infectious enthusiasm that would be suitable to a used-car salesman. He arranged for the three of us to meet for a beer at Humpy’s, a popular downtown Anchorage bar on West Sixth Avenue. Jessen is short and stocky, with a square build and slightly crooked teeth. He was wearing a wool jacket with a yoked back and oversized buttons, and his fingers were nicked up with many little cuts. I’d been prepared to talk Jessen into making the trip, but no such persuasion was necessary. He ordered a beer and a blackened-halibut sandwich, rolled out a few maps, and jumped right into the nitty-gritty details of what it would take to float the Copper River. When we left, Jessen said, “I can’t totally commit until I talk this over with Rafferty. It’s his raft, too.”

  I awaited Jessen’s call for a week, but he never got back to me. I called him, and he didn’t call me back. I couldn’t imagine what the problem was. I’d been blown off, and for no good reason! After eight days had passed, I started to work out a whole new set of plans that didn’t rely on anyone else’s input. Then one night Danny was hanging out at a party and talking about buffalo hunting with some guy, and the guy says, “I heard that Matt Rafferty’s going on a buffalo hunt, too.”

  “What?” Danny said. “Are you serious? With who?”

  “I don’t know. I guess Jeff Jessen knows someone who has a brother who drew a buffalo tag for the Copper River.”

  “That’s my brother,” said Danny. “That’s us!”

  NEAR ITS CONFLUENCE with the Copper River, the Klutina flows through a narrow channel bracketed by heavy stands of spruce trees and steep banks formed by fist-and head-sized rocks. We can only see what is immediately in front of us on the sharp bends, so our course down the river relies on snap decisions. Danny and I are sitting toward the bow of the raft, me on the starboard side and Danny on port. We’re each wearing a dry suit, these one-piece jobbies with watertight zippers, built-in bootees, and neoprene gaskets that cinch around your neck and wrists to prevent the intrusion of liquid. Basically, it’s like wearing a body-sized latex condom, except it’s your neck that emerges through the opening rather than the base of your pecker. Pulled over layers of heavy clothes, the suits restrict our movements and make our paddling sluggish. Rafferty and Jessen are at the stern, shouting out commands. “Hard on left … No, hard on right … Hard on right, go, go go.” We maneuver the raft like a tank on tracks; the sharpest turns are executed by moving one side forward and the other side backward. When I turn around, I see that Rafferty has a big grin on his face. He’s got a runner’s build, tall and thin, with blond hair capped by a tasseled hat. He seems like the kind of guy who’d be happy even if he had to shovel horse shit—so long as it was next to whitewater.

  The confluence of the two rivers reminds me of the junction where an alleyway meets an expressway. During the peak spring runoff, the Klutina dumps an average of 7,080 cubic feet of water per second into the Copper River, which itself carries an annual average of 57,400 cubic feet per second. That’s like having 57,400 soccer balls roll past you in the time that it takes you to say “one-Mississippi.” But the soccer balls do not roll by in one heavy mass; instead, they are broken into many different channels, or braids. In places, the Copper River is split into six or more braids, stretched across a mile-wide floodplain. The braids twist together and split apart like frayed rope, tangling themselves around scores of long, narrow islands. The river is constantly moving these islands, at once destroying some and creating others. If an island can hold for a few years, it becomes armored with a carpeting of sedges and willows that help to hold it in place.

  I’m struck by the lunar appearance of the river, its stark grayness. Essentially, the river’s floodplain is composed of a vast, deep expanse of glacial debris. Eighteen percent of the Copper Basin is covered in glaciers, which pulverize the surrounding mountains into something known to geologists as glacial till. The finest glacial till is called rock flour, particles so small and fine that they turn the water the color of potter’s clay. Every year, the Copper River carries about sixty-nine million tons of debris to the ocean, or about thirty-five times the total amount of debris that was hauled away during cleanup after the destruction of the World Trade Center.

  In places, the meandering channels of the Copper River are eating away at the steep hillsides, which border the floodplain. The river takes away slices of the hillsides in vertical chunks—think of cutting a meat loaf into slices that fall away intact or else crumble into the pan. Some of the eroded slopes are one hundred or more feet high. Within the first few miles of our float, I watch erosion happen several times. As we float along, little pebbles and puffs of dirt fall away from the banks and trail into the river. Sometimes the falling debris knocks off more rocks and dirt, creating miniature landslides. Above these eroded banks, the vegetative mats of the forest hang over the precipices like heads of foam tilting over the lips of overfilled glasses of beer. Trees that reach too far over the cliffs tend to lose their footing and plun
ge down into the river en masse. We pass several places where dozens of trees have come down at once in great tangles of wood. The limbs, still springy with life, wave in the current and emit swishing sounds. Trees that have spent a season or two in the river are stripped of their limbs and bark. They look like perfect telephone poles, except they are still attached to their root wads. If you sank one of these trees in the ground upside down, it would look like a long-stemmed flower with a wooden blossom.

  In part, the buffalo chose to live in this specific area because of the erosion. There are steep bluffs a half mile away from the water, evidence that the river has changed its course and volume many times over the millennia; with the river no longer sloughing away at their bases, the cliffs taper off and vegetation takes hold. Sedges, grasses, and wildflowers carpet the soft soil of the hillsides, but trees don’t hold as easily. The lack of trees exposes the bluffs to the sun and wind. In the winter, the wind carries the snow away, and the sun helps to melt it. While the buffalo might prefer to winter among the thick stands of willows along the river, at times these bluffs provide the only food for many miles that is not encased in snow and ice.

  When it comes to the cold, buffalo have a lot of anatomical tricks up their sleeves. Proportionate to body size, the buffalo’s trachea is larger than that of any other large land mammal; when it takes a breath of cold air, the air is pre-warmed inside the trachea before it moves down to the animal’s lungs. This way, ambient air temperatures have a diminished effect on the animal’s core body temperature, which is 101.6 degrees Fahrenheit. A buffalo’s coat of hair is another handy adaptation. The hair above its eyes is so short that it looks like someone buzzed it with an electric clipper. This shortness prevents freezing water from accumulating against sensitive eye tissues. Domestic cattle have longer hair around their eyeballs and are commonly blinded by gobs of ice. With dark hair growing out of black skin, buffalo can absorb much more warmth from the sun than light-skinned and light-haired critters. And their hair is thick. On their mid-rib, female buffalo calves have about 2,992 hair fibers per square centimeter, while males have a bit fewer, at 2,182. (The total number of hair follicles on an animal is constant throughout its life. So as it gets bigger, the hairs are less dense because they’re spread over a greater amount of space.) The hair densities of cattle are highly variable between individual animals, but Holstein cattle have hair densities ranging from 550 to 1,095 follicles per square centimeter.

  In the late 1970s, Professor Robert Hudson, the director of the Alberta Veterinary Research Institute, and a team of colleagues attempted to put numbers and figures to the buffalo’s cold tolerance. They selected the six-month-old calves of four creatures: the Tibetan yak, Scottish highland cattle, Hereford cattle, and American buffalo. The researchers put the animals into airtight, insulated boxes resembling horse trailers and subjected each calf to increasingly cold temperatures. They were looking for the moment when the animals’ metabolic rate increased as a response to the cold. They monitored the animals’ breathing with a device that measures the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels going into and coming out of the box. With the input constant, changes in the output represent changes in the animals’ breathing patterns. Hereford cattle hit their critical temperature at 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The yak and the highland cattle hit theirs at –13 degrees Fahrenheit. At –22 degrees Fahrenheit, the buffalo’s metabolic rate was still decreasing as an energy-saving strategy. The buffalo’s critical temperature remains unknown, because no one’s gotten a box cold enough to find it.

  While buffalo can tolerate the extreme cold, Mother Nature does have her ways of toppling them in great numbers. Lightning sometimes killed dozens of buffalo in a single zap, leaving their smoldering carcasses on the open ground. Near the great bend in the Arkansas River, a Sioux war party watched a tornado overtake a buffalo herd. It deposited the animals’ carcasses in a quarter-mile-long row that was stacked several buffalo deep. The Indians said that the air pressure from the tornado popped the buffalo’s eyeballs out of their sockets. Disease killed them. In the 1820s, the Sioux described a great disease that killed almost all of the buffalo in southeast Nebraska. Seven warriors were returning from a war with the Missouri River tribes, and they nearly starved while crossing this corner of the state. They found a dying bull with a swollen and rotting tongue. Six of the seven Sioux ate it, and they all died. From then on, they referred to 1825 as “When the Six Died from Eating the Whistling Buffalo.” Wildfires killed them. In 1864, a nineteen-year-old captive of the Oglala Sioux named Fanny Kelly passed through the aftermath of a prairie fire and reported so many buffalo “that had fallen victims to the embrace of the flames” that her captors’ horses had a hard time passing through the pile. Another man watched a herd of buffalo fleeing from a prairie fire near his camp and witnessed “a large number” plunge over a steep riverbank and fall hundreds of feet to get dashed on a rocky shoreline. A Canadian man traveling in North Dakota found herds of burned buffalo that were “dead and dying, blind, lame, singed and roasted.” He said the wounded were “staggering about, sometimes running afoul of a large stone, at other times tumbling down hill and falling into creeks not yet frozen over.” And they got stuck, mired in mud bogs, river bottoms, quicksand, and tar pits. In the summer of 1867, a herd of four thousand buffalo went into the mud at the confluence of the Platte River and Plum Creek, and only two thousand came out. The remaining two thousand—or around 2.5 million pounds of buffalo—joined the riverbed. South of the Platte River, along the Arkansas, an army officer named Dangerfield Parker attempted to stalk a herd of buffalo that were wading in the water. When he got close enough, he realized that the buffalo were perfectly dead. Stuck fast in the mud, the carcasses had become mummified in the dry prairie air.

  It’s been estimated that accidental deaths—from fire, falling, drowning, tornadoes—claim an annual 3–9 percent of the continent’s population of wild buffalo today. If you accept that the rate of 3–9 percent was constant through time (and there’s no reason to think it wasn’t), you see that North America was once home to one to three million accidental buffalo deaths every year. At first glance that figure is hard to digest, but just look at a collection of statistics from Wood Buffalo National Park. In 1974, three thousand of the park’s buffalo, or about one-third of the total population, drowned in the Peace-Athabasca Delta. Thirteen years earlier, in 1961, roughly the same number drowned in the same place. In 1959, a thousand drowned there. In 1958, five hundred drowned there.

  As the data from Wood Buffalo National Park suggests, water is the No. 1 enemy of buffalo. The substance has likely killed more buffalo than all other factors combined, including human hunting. The Spanish conquistador Coronado was perhaps the first European to witness the aftermath wrought by the mixture of American buffalo and large bodies of water. In 1540, he was traveling the American Great Plains and encountered a mound of buffalo bones piled along the leeward edge of a lake. His men estimated the mound of bones to be eighteen feet wide, as tall as two men, and about as long as a crossbow shot—maybe four hundred or five hundred yards.

  While Coronado was treated to an image of cleaned and bleached bones, many other explorers witnessed sights and smells of drowned buffalo that were much less appetizing. In May 1795, the fur trader John McDonnell descended the Qu’Appelle River and spent a day counting dead buffalo that were either floating in the river or mired along the banks. By the time he made camp for the night, his count had reached 7,360. In several places, McDonnell got out and walked across the carcasses and remarked that the animals were stacked three to five deep. John Bradbury, a Scottish-born botanist who traveled the Missouri River in 1811, spotted his first drowned buffalo on April 2 when he was 240 miles upstream from St. Louis.* Two weeks later, writes Bradbury, “we began to notice more particularly the great number of drowned buffaloes that were floating on the river; vast numbers of them were also thrown ashore, and upon the rafts, on the points of the islands.” In 1829, a man named Sir George Simpso
n saw “as many as 10,000 of their putrid carcasses lying mired in a single ford of the Saskatchewan, and contaminating the air for many miles around.” The German explorer and ethnologist Prince Maximilian traveled up the Missouri River in the early 1830s. He wrote of how “whole herds were often drowned in the Missouri” and described places where eighteen hundred or more dead buffalo were collected in some of the sloughs of the river. Along the Red River, another traveler noted that “drowned buffalo continue to drift by in whole herds throughout the month, and toward the end for two days and nights their dead bodies formed one continuous line in the current.” He watched thousands come to rest against the banks. It smelled so bad that he refused to eat his dinner, and he wondered if he was witnessing a rare tragedy. When he put the question to his Indian guides, they told him that every spring was “about the same.”

  All of these drowned buffalo carcasses had dramatic effects on the ecology of large rivers. Along the Missouri River, the annual “runs” of dead buffalo were an important part of the environmental cycle. People passing near Great Falls, Montana, reported congregations of grizzly bears gathered there in the spring to feed on drowned buffalo that came over the falls and got bashed against the rocks.* John Bradbury described how the carcasses on the Missouri “attracted an immense number of turkey buzzards.” Prince Maximilian reported that many of the river’s islands were formed by the collection of silt against rafts of drowned buffalo. Other explorers watched living buffalo cross the river on mushy bridges made from the bodies of drowned buffalo. Still others claimed to see the entire river dammed by accumulations of beached carcasses.

  “HARD LEFT,” Rafferty yells. “Left, left, left. Go, paddle.” We’ve been floating down the river for seven hours, and we’ve just rounded a bend to see the mouth of the Dadina River go shooting past. It flows into the Copper through a broad, shallow channel of water that you could cross in three running jumps. Doing so would cause you to bust your ass, because the river rocks here are as slippery as vegetable oil. I jump from the raft with the bowline in my hand; the raft hits the bank like a bumper car and bounces away. I put the line in a double wrap around the trunk of a dead cottonwood and use the friction to slow the raft. The force of the current nearly uproots the small tree. Danny and Jessen jump to the bank and drag over a large drift log. We run two lines from the log to the boat, one fore and one aft, and then mound the log with four hundred or five hundred pounds of rock. The raft isn’t going anywhere. We load enough gear in our packs to get us through a couple days, some extra clothes, food, skinning knives, a tarp. Then we start heading up the tributary.