American Buffalo

by Steven Rinella

  The walking distance between me and these bulls is much greater than the actual linear expanse separating us, because a river and a lot of rugged ground lie between them and me. I use my compass to take a bearing on their location, at 280 degrees. It’s going to take me about an hour to get over there. They’ll be long gone by then, but at least I’ll have a point of reference as well as an idea of where I might pick up their tracks in the dusting of snow on the trails.

  Dropping down off the ridge is the easy part; we pick our way down an eight-foot-high ledge by climbing down backward and hooking our boots and hands into crevices of rock. From there gravity takes over, and we slide down a rocky slope on our asses while using our boot heels for brakes. We land in a grove of young cottonwoods along the Chetaslina. The river is roaring so loud that we have to raise our voices to hear each other talk.

  Now is the part I’ve been dreading all morning. The Chetaslina moves about a thousand cubic feet of glacial runoff per second and drops seven hundred feet in its final eighteen miles. That’s as much elevation as the Colorado River loses through the entire 229-mile stretch of the Grand Canyon. In short, the river is really cold, about 32 degrees, and really turbulent. Still, Rafferty removes his boots, drops his pants and socks, and then puts his boots back on his bare feet. He picks up a walking stick and steps into the current. He uses the stick to probe the river’s bottom ahead and downstream of him, trying to wedge it into gaps between large rocks. With the stick anchored on the bottom, he leans into it and trudges forward. In just about two minutes he’s across the river, wet to his waist and doing jumping jacks to warm back up. I don’t want to look like a candyass, so I climb in alongside Danny and Jessen and we start across. My berries shrivel up into my groin the minute they hit the water, and I scoot across while silently begging various divinities that I be spared from stumbling and dunking myself and all my gear. Once across, I remove my outer shirt and dry my legs, then put my clothes back on and drain out my boots as best as possible.

  Matt Rafferty crossing the Chetaslina.

  I check my compass again and pick a landmark on the hill before plowing into the alder-choked hellhole bordering the river. It’s so thick that I have to drag my pack behind me on the ground. I use my other hand to cradle my rifle in a safe position so the barrel and scope don’t get clogged with debris. I remind myself that I need to put a piece of tape across the barrel once the air warms enough for the tape to stick well. The ground rises up abruptly when we hit an old riverbank. The alders give way to grass, and there’s a buffalo trail following the edge. I see a wolf track in there, and then some old buffalo tracks and a couple of fresh sets. Crystals of ice are forming in pools of water collected in the deeper tracks. I point at the ice. “Temperature’s coming down again,” I whisper. We cross the trail and plunge into the spruce trees, which are interspersed with an abundance of wild rose. The thorns on the stems scratch across our clothes like the sound of Velcro coming undone. Downed trees are everywhere, so we have to climb from one log to the next, often going twenty or thirty yards without actually hitting the ground.

  “There’s gotta be a buffalo path through here that goes in the right direction,” I say.

  “You’d think,” says Danny.

  “I don’t know how they’d get through here if there wasn’t,” I say. “Let’s back up to that trail and see if there’s a fork somewhere that goes back into here.”

  We back up and follow the trail northward about fifty yards, and there’s a buffalo path headed in the right direction. The path zigzags in an erratic pattern, dodging logs and thick brush and sometimes veering off for no apparent reason at all. I realize that we’re probably covering three times as much ground as we would going in a straight line, but we do it three times quicker than if we were bushwhacking. As the path approaches the slopes of the valley’s western wall, the trees become sparser and the ground evens out. A few small trails split off the main path, which grows thin and hard to discern, and then it vanishes altogether as it enters an opening. We stack dead limbs against the base of a tree to mark the location of the trail in case we have to come back in the dark.

  Once we’re high enough up the hill to see over the trees in the valley floor, I can look across and see the exact spot where we were sitting when we first spotted the bulls about two hours ago. The dusting of snow has melted in that time, and now there’s nothing to show fresh tracks. I check my compass; the spot is at about 90 degrees. Despite the trail’s crookedness, we’re only 10 degrees off from where we wanted to be. The four bulls were moving north, so they should definitely be somewhere upstream from us. If they stayed on the slope, they’ll be fairly easy to find. There’s virtually no chance that we’ll locate them if they dropped into the timber at the bottom of the valley or crested the ridge and dropped down the other side.

  I whisper to Rafferty and Jessen that we’re going to move along through the meadows very slowly, angling uphill and up valley. “Stay back a bit,” I say. “But not too far back, you know? Keep your eyes and ears open. If you see something, make a little bird whistle. We do this noise, like this.” I make the noise. It’s more of a people noise than a bird noise, but it does the trick.

  I work the bolt of my rifle. It snags the top of a shell in the magazine and slides it forward into the chamber. It’s a .300 Magnum, locked and loaded. With Danny behind me, I angle up the hillside toward the crest. We cross a number of small buffalo trails, and then we reach a major buffalo hangout at the top of the ridge. The ground is spotted with buffalo wallows as though someone lobbed some artillery rounds up here. The trail along the crest is as wide as a pickup truck in places, though it squeezes down to a buffalo’s width when pinched between trees.

  The spruce trees just into the woods from the trail have been de-limbed and rubbed bare by the animals’ back scratching. Dead, broken limbs are scattered about, and the dried needles have dropped from the limbs. Each rubbed tree has a little trough around its perimeter from where the animals walked in circles as they scratched. Some of the trees have been toppled over; others are snapped off. The toppled trees make me think of an oft-repeated story, about how early efforts to connect the eastern and the western United States with telegraph lines were hampered by buffalo. The animals that wandered the treeless plains couldn’t resist the chance to scratch themselves against the poles that supported the telegraph lines, and they’d keep at it until the poles were knocked over. An official in the East wrote to suggest driving spikes into the poles to protect them from buffalo. His plan was executed, but the buffalo only began scratching themselves even more.

  I start moving slowly along the trail, stopping every ten or so steps to look and listen. There are three problems that face a hunter who’s stalking a big-game animal. (I’m speaking of wilderness mammals that have continued to evolve with historic, long-term human predation, mind you, and not those animals that you see chewing their cuds next to national park gift shops.) At the top of the list is human odor. If an animal smells me before I see it, it’s likely that I never will see it. Wild animals live and die by their noses; they might question their eyes and ears, but their nostrils don’t lie. Right now I’m okay as far as odor goes; the wind on this ridgeline is just right, with the thermal currents carrying my scent back down the valley and away from where I think the buffalo might be.

  I do have to worry about the next two concerns, sight and sound. Of the two, sight is most important. While an animal might not immediately run off when it sees me, it certainly will not forget that I’m here. Usually an animal will spot me by detecting the movement of my body. If you look at a large herbivore such as a buffalo, you’ll see that its eyes are laterally positioned, or placed on opposite sides of the head. This type of eye placement allows for panoramic vision; a buffalo can see almost 90 percent of its surroundings without turning its head (obscured, however, by wisps of hair). Lateral positioning is superb for the detection of predators that are lurking to the sides and rear of an animal, though i
t does leave the animal with a compromised ability to see visual detail. Predators, such as owls, humans, and lions, have eyes that are frontally positioned, allowing for narrower, more binocular vision. (Humans see a little less than half of their surroundings at any given moment.) Frontal positioning is superb for depth perception, which enables predators to calculate the proper timing and trajectory for effective strikes and to concentrate on a specific target. This is essential, because a 150-pound mountain lion needs to have a very precise strike if it’s going to take down a 300-pound yearling elk.*

  Sound is last in the sensory hierarchy. Wild animals do not always associate human sounds with immediate trouble, though they most certainly pay attention to our noises. Out of curiosity, I’ve hidden from distant herds of buffalo and yelled at them. They’ll sometimes stare in the direction of the noise for several minutes before going back to whatever they were doing. Then, once they resume their activities, they will periodically snap their heads up to take a fresh “listen” in the area of the earlier noise. Buffalo ears are small and hidden inside the thick hair on their heads, but if you watch a buffalo’s ears carefully, you can see that they swivel in a slow back-and-forth motion that reminds me of a submarine’s periscope. If nothing reveals itself, they may even walk toward the noise. It’s almost as if they’re checking up on unresolved business, as if they’re thinking, “What the heck was that?”

  We work our way along the ridge, stopping, looking, listening. I find a dry buffalo chip tucked under an overhanging spruce where it was shielded from the weather, and I add it to some others in my pack’s water bottle pocket in case I need to make a fire later. An hour goes by, then two hours. We see no trace of the four buffalo. They have simply vanished. When I had looked at this ridge from the opposite side of the river, I thought it ran in a straight line. Now that I’m up here, though, I see that there is a slight curve to it, facing inward toward the river. Imagine being perched on the rim of a coffee cup. You’d be able to see the interior wall of the cup curving away to both your left and your right. Though the curvature of the ridge is much less severe than a coffee cup’s rim, the effect is similar; it allows me to see a greater stretch of the slope from any given position. I tell the guys that we should sit and wait. We spread out a bit on the ridge, so we each have a different perspective on the surrounding land. I go down the slope about twenty yards and climb out onto an outcropping of rocks that gives me a little better view upstream. I get all nestled in among some boulders that will break up my outline and conceal my movements in case a buffalo appears out of the timber at close range. I take off my backpack and pull out my extra clothes and some food. I put the pack against a rock and lean against it. One time, a friend of mine was nestled among some rocks like this down in Montana while he hunted coyotes. He felt something sharp under his ass and lifted up to see a large Paleo-Indian projectile point. He wasn’t the first hunter to sit in those rocks.

  I lay out my food and water to my right side and then check my rifle’s scope and barrel to make sure they’re clear of dust and debris. If water or snow gets into the barrel and freezes, it can cause the barrel to rupture when you pull the trigger. I remember that I need to put some tape over the barrel to keep it clean. I dig into my pack for my hunting kit and pull out a small roll of duct tape. I peel off a strip that’s about a half inch wide and four inches long and place half of it over the end of the barrel. The sticky part isn’t very sticky in the cold, so I rub the tape’s backing in order to heat the adhesive and get it to work better. Then I wrap the second half of the tape around the barrel’s end to hold the first half in place, the way you would bandage the tip of your finger. When a cartridge is fired, the expansion of the gases is what drives the bullet out. Some of those gases escape ahead of the bullet, and they rip the tape away before the bullet gets there.

  Up the hill from me, in a mountain ash, there is a small flock of Bohemian waxwings stripping fruit from the tree. That’s the only thing moving. I pull on my hat and gloves. Either those buffalo will come out of that timber on the valley floor, or they won’t. It’s entirely up to them. I can’t see the sun through the clouds, but I can tell where it is by looking around until my eyes hurt. I track the sun across the sky until it’s close to the horizon. It takes hours. Then the sun ducks down below the clouds and lays out a nice sunset, just as smooth as if it were throwing out a picnic blanket. My fingers get cold. Then my toes get cold. I burrow into my jacket, but it doesn’t really help. I sit like that until it’s almost too dark to see my brother, just fifty yards away. The buffalo never show up.

  9

  WHEN WE’RE DOZING OFF in our tent at night, Rafferty usually announces that we’ll probably be dead in the morning from a buffalo stampede. “It’s been nice knowing you boys, all the same,” he says. At first it was only a half joke, because buffalo are known to kill people on occasion. The most vicious attack ever reported is a completely unsubstantiated tale passed down by the early-twentieth-century folklorist and historian Henry W. Shoemaker. He wrote about a giant Pennsylvania bull named Old Logan that led his herd of “brutes” into a cabin occupied by a woman and her three small children; the victims were “crushed deep into the mud of the earthen floor by the cruel hoofs.”

  More truthful stories come out of Yellowstone National Park, where you’ve got more of a chance of being mauled by a buffalo than you do a bear. Between 1980 and 1999, sixty-one park visitors were injured by buffalo. That’s over twice the number injured by bears during the same time span. While Colonel Richard Irving Dodge claimed to personally know five hunters who were killed by buffalo in the Kansas Territory of the mid-nineteenth century, Yellowstone’s buffalo seem to have something against photographers. Two men, one in 1971 and the other in 1983, were killed by buffalo while closing in for snapshots. The most common buffalo-related injury in the park is a puncture wound to the legs, though a dozen or so of the victims have been thrown into the air by the swift swing of a buffalo’s head. One man turned a somersault in the air and ended up in a tree. In 1984, a sixty-three-year-old Texan named Gladys Hoffman was attacked by a buffalo in a Yellowstone campground while she posed for a photo. The animal punched one hole below her ribs and another hole into the cheek of her ass and then threw her about fifteen feet through the air. Besides her puncture wounds, she suffered fractures in her ribs, back, and wrist. She lived to sue about it.

  Unfortunately, Rafferty’s not here to repeat his joke. He, Danny, and Jessen took off this morning in the raft. They got an early start, figuring that they’d make it downriver to the village of Chitina by nightfall and then back to Anchorage in time for work on Monday. When they left, Jessen assured me that he’d come back down and look for me next weekend. When the guys shoved off and the current scooted them away, Danny turned in the raft and waved back at me. “Nice knowing you,” he said.

  Now I feel like I’m inside one of those horror movie trailers where the announcer warns, “There’s no one to hear you scream.” Not only that, but I have no way of getting to a place where they could hear me scream. A big, cold river separates me from any feasible route out of here. I boil water for oatmeal and coffee, and then I’m distracted when I feel something like a busted-up pack of ramen noodles inside my backpack. I stick my hand in and remember that I’ve been filling the pocket with buffalo chips. I select the two biggest remaining pieces, which are the size and thickness of my hand if I were to cut my fingers off. I place the pieces on the fire, and they’re gone within a minute. It’s like watching toilet paper burn. I walk into the willow patch and collect some larger chips that have the opposite characteristics of what I’ve just burned. These are twelve-inch disks that are dense and thick. But when I put them on the fire, they refuse to burn and instead let off a gag-inducing smoke. What the hell? I think. The Smithsonian’s William Hornaday loved a good buffalo chip fire. He was especially impressed by the buffalo’s tendency to shit in sheltered valleys and draws—just the places where man liked to camp. When pioneers were cro
ssing the Great Plains on their way to the goldfields of California or the farmlands of Oregon, it’s said that they would cook a couple hundred meals over buffalo chip fires.* If these things were such a pain, how did they manage to pull that off? Flustered, I gather up some moderately dense chips from the willow patch and prop them on twigs next to the fire. I put some rocks behind the chips to reflect heat and help them dry out.

  A woman and child gather cooking fuel on the Great Plains.

  As I’m messing around with the chips, a single wolf lets out a long howl toward the southwest. It’s the first howl I’ve heard so far this trip. Wolves howl for all kinds of reasons that are difficult to decipher, but a single howl from a lone wolf is usually understood to be a form of communication between the wolf and his pack. It’s like a wolf saying, “Hey, I’m over here,” or, “Where are you guys?”† I’ve heard a number of lone-wolf howls before, but it occurs to me that I’ve never heard a lone-wolf howl while I was alone. This feels different, as if the wolf were teasing me.

  My map shows a large network of lowlands about a half mile down the Copper River from my camp. There are braids of river channels drawn on the map, along with symbols for marshland, so I figure that the area is below the average high-water mark and therefore public land. I load up my pack and grab my rifle and start heading downstream. I pick my way over large piles of driftwood tangled on the bank. After walking for about fifteen minutes, I come to several dry stream channels coursing out of a large willow flat. I follow the largest channel away from the river. The willows and alders are thick on either side of me, so that I can’t see more than ten or twenty yards in any direction. I find a game trail that comes out of the willows and intersects the stream channel. Along with old buffalo tracks, there are prints from grizzly, fox, coyote, moose, and wolf. The wolf was going in the same direction that I am. The tracks are fresh, and I think about the wolf howl from earlier. Is this where that howl came from? No, it was more to the north. And farther off.