American Buffalo

by Steven Rinella

  In the late winter, Bushpilot Dave flies over this country looking for carcasses from moose that starved or were killed by wolves over the winter. When Dave finds a carcass, he watches it for grizzly bears throughout the spring. A bear coming out of hibernation will camp out on a moose carcass for days on end. If it’s a big bear, Dave might try to land a client within the vicinity of the carcass so he can try to stalk the bear.

  “You ever see bears on buffalo carcasses?” I asked him.

  “No, I never have,” said Dave.

  “You think the wolves around here will kill buffalo?”

  “I’ve never seen any evidence of it.”

  Bushpilot Dave told me about a time when he was flying up the Chetaslina valley, near the glaciers, and saw something that caught his attention. A small herd of buffalo was lying in a patch of willows while three or four wolves pranced through the middle of the group. “The bison didn’t even stand up,” said Bushpilot Dave. “They just looked at those wolves like ‘What you going to do about it?’ ”

  When Europeans showed up in North America, they found wolves throughout Mexico and Canada and in every state except Hawaii. Wolves were most abundant on the Great Plains, which was home to maybe one and a half million. The wolves followed Indians, scavenging the buffalo carcasses that they left behind. When the Lewis and Clark expedition was traveling up the Missouri River in 1805, they found a hundred rotting buffalo carcasses left over in a place where Indians had made a large kill. “We saw a great many wolves in the neighborhood of these mangled carcasses,” wrote Lewis. The wolves were so overstuffed that Captain Clark walked up to one and killed it with his spontoon, a sort of walking staff tipped with a blade.

  Wolves certainly did not need humans to kill buffalo for them. The wolves hunted by feeling the herd out, so to speak; they’d hang around, checking for crippled or sick animals, or calves that might be separated from the herd. It was a perfectly efficient method, especially when one considers that among a herd of five thousand or ten thousand buffalo, there’s bound to be an animal or two that’s in no condition to mount a serious defense. All in all, it’s estimated that wolves killed 33 percent of all buffalo calves annually. Maybe one million to two million buffalo died at the teeth of wolves every year.

  Nowadays, wolves occur in numbers that remind me of my monthly checking account balances: Northern Michigan and Wisconsin share about 400. Minnesota has 2,500. Idaho has 200. Wyoming and Montana have about 250 wolves between them, which are generally confined to the mountainous regions dominated by federally owned wilderness areas and national parkland. Any wolf in Montana or Wyoming that strays eastward into the Plains is going to find a lack of buffalo and elk and an abundance of sheep and cattle. And as soon as it lays a tooth to a piece of livestock, it becomes fair game for government-paid predator control officers. Canada has somewhere between 52,000 and 60,000 wolves, which occupy 90 percent of their historic range in that country. (My checking account analogy stops with Canada.) The 10 percent of Canada that is missing wolves is largely that portion of the country which lies within the Great Plains—the same portion that used to have the most wolves and buffalo.

  In Alaska, which has a healthy and stable population of six thousand or seven thousand wolves, the predators still occupy their entire historic range. On average, Alaskan wolves weigh eighty to ninety pounds and eat seven pounds of meat a day—that means that one wolf could eat five mature buffalo a year. If every wolf in Alaska had to rely on buffalo meat, Alaska’s entire supply would be used up in less than a month. But, as Bushpilot Dave suggested, the wolves in Alaska do not seem to target buffalo. The reason is that the wolves haven’t yet “learned” how to kill them. Wolves are educated by their pack leaders, who were educated by the pack leaders before them. The wolves in Alaska haven’t had much time to learn how to handle buffalo, which weren’t introduced to the state until the late 1920s (they didn’t show up along the Copper River until even later, in the 1950s). Biologists also believe that wolves haven’t bothered to learn how to hunt buffalo because it’s not worth their time to do so. There are only a few buffalo herds in Alaska, and those herds are smallish, with just a hundred or so animals per herd. For wolves, the value of the resource does not justify the danger and energy that would go into exploiting it. Wes Olson, a ranger at Elk Island National Park, near Edmonton, Alberta, told me that “it takes a herd of about a thousand bison to get wolves interested.” At that point, he explained, “there’s a greater chance that the herd will contain unhealthy animals, or an abundance of calves.”

  The three thousand to four thousand buffalo that live in Yellowstone National Park share the land with a couple hundred wolves. Those wolves are monitored, studied, pestered, and photographed more than any other population of predators on earth, and all that attention has yielded some compelling observations about wolf-buffalo interactions. As of 2003, park biologists had documented fifty-seven predatory interactions between buffalo and wolves. Most of those interactions took place in late winter and occurred in areas marked by a scarcity of elk, which usually provide the bulk of the Yellowstone wolves’ diets.

  To kill large prey, wolves usually start by biting the rear of the fleeing animal’s legs until it is “hamstrung,” or can no longer run. The biologists in Yellowstone found that the wolves would quickly lose interest in a herd of buffalo if the buffalo refused to run. Of those fifty-seven observed interactions, the wolves could only get the buffalo to run on fourteen occasions. Even then, the buffalo proved to be formidable prey, as the buffalo’s herding tendencies worked to their advantage. All those whirring, kicking, tightly interwoven hooves presented the wolves with a dangerous situation. In fourteen attempts made against herds of fleeing buffalo, the wolves made a kill only four times. On those occasions, the wolves either isolated a buffalo or else chased the herd into deep snow. On average, the battles that ended in a buffalo’s death lasted about nine hours.

  In the mid-to late nineteenth century, during the great buffalo slaughter of the Euro-American hide hunters, there was such an abundance of unused buffalo flesh strewn across the landscape that wolves grew fat and plentiful. Indians talked of running overfed wolves down on horseback to kill them with knives, and Euro-American explorers described “tamed” wolves lurking near the camps of hide hunters. When the hide hunters began to run low on buffalo, they sought alternative ways to supplement their incomes. Some expanded into the wolf hide business. When a wolfer killed a buffalo, he’d lace its carcass with strychnine. In the morning, all he had to do was collect the dead wolves. Some wolfers would wait until they had a wounded buffalo on the ground and then open a vein with a sharp knife and give the buffalo a mainline of strychnine. The buffalo’s circulatory system would carry the poison all through the carcass, saving poison and increasing the wolf kill. It’s commonly said that the wolf hunters were some of the only white people who were disappointed to see the buffalo vanish. They suspected that wolves would vanish right along with them, and they were ultimately right.

  AS I FOLLOW THE STREAM CHANNEL, I realize that I’ve lost the set of wolf tracks. Maybe the wolf smelled me and took off. I follow the channel for another half hour, taking it very slowly, and it begins to split into many other smaller channels. I stay to the middle branch, and the surrounding hills close in. I reach the back end of the willow flat without noticing any fresh buffalo tracks. So much for this plan, I think. I check out my map and compass. If I walk to the northeast, I’ll hit the eastern bank of the Chetaslina River at a point that is much higher up the valley than I went yesterday. I should go up there and find a good lookout, I think, where I can see across to the other side of the valley where those four bulls were hanging around.

  To get there, I have to cut through a couple miles of land owned by Ahtna, Inc., or else go all the way back to the mouth of the Chetaslina and then follow the river up. This presents an unsavory dilemma, because I hate looking at the same ground twice even more than I hate trespassing. So with a nagging feelin
g of guilt I follow a small game trail into the spruce forest, and once again I’m a reluctant violator of the laws of private property. Also, I’m once again struggling through alders, rose hips, and downed spruce trees. I step over a log and snag the leg of my wool pants on a broken limb. It rips a hole just big enough to accommodate my thumb. I always carry a travel-sized spool of dental floss in my pack along with a curved needle designed for stitching people up. I think about stopping to stitch the tear, but for some reason I don’t. After ten more minutes of fighting through the brush, I look down and see that the small rip has expanded from the back of my knee clear down to my ankle, offering a vivid validation of the old saying “a stitch in time saves nine.”

  In fact, a stitch in time would have saved about seventy. For a half hour I sit on a wet log in a thin pair of underwear while I sew my pants back together. Once I’m on my way again, I run into a well-trodden buffalo trail that seems to be going more or less where I want to be. The trail is stamped through the mosses and lichens on the forest floor, right down to bare dirt and rock. When I stand on the bottom of the trail, the normal level of the forest floor is at my shins. Like many of the buffalo trails I’ve found, this one seems perfectly errant in its patterns. In truth, though, there’s a system to its direction. Buffalo select their trails in order to travel over the path of least resistance, even if that involves taking a few extra steps. But there’s a limit to how far a buffalo will detour. Following their trails, I can almost understand their thinking. If the trail intersects a nasty swath of tangled and downed timber that would take a long time to go around, they’ll opt to plow on through like bulldozers. In some places, the trail breaks into several routes through the obstacles, as though different buffalo have different opinions about how to handle travel annoyances.

  A few hundred years ago, Euro-American explorers who traveled through buffalo country thought that the animals were incapable of walking straight lines. Buffalo have a thick mat of hair between their eyes that resembles souped-up pubic hair in its texture. People assumed that buffalo trails were crooked because the animals had to walk sideways in order to see where they were headed. Other people thought this was ridiculous. They figured that buffalo walked in crooked lines because their eyes were too far off to the sides of their heads; buffalo, they explained, couldn’t see forward or backward at all, hair or no hair. “Not being good travelers sideways,” one man said, “they look ahead with one eye and to the rear with the other, deflecting to the right and then to the left for a distance of two or three hundred yards.”

  In the early 1830s, when engineers were laying out the route for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, it’s said that they had to follow buffalo trails through West Virginia. In two places where the railroad was run through tunnels, along the eighty-three-mile stretch between Grafton and Parkersburg, the buffalo trails are supposedly directly overhead. There are many such stories across the eastern United States. The passage through the Cumberland Gap is said to have started out as a buffalo trail. Indians in Kentucky used a 225-mile path between Big Bone Lick and Maysville that they called, simply, “the Buffalo Path.” When Euro-American settlers started coming into the first “far west” of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, they often used buffalo trails instead of Indian trails because they were hoping to run into the one and not the other. Their movements and settlements were influenced by the buffalo paths, which led them to things that they needed: meat, water, salt licks, meadows, and good places to cross rivers. Later, they widened the paths into wagon trails and, later still, roads.

  One man who did not think that buffalo made good engineers when it came to the routing of roads was George Washington. The buffalo had minor cameo roles throughout Washington’s life. He killed a buffalo in the Ohio Territory back in 1770. A year before the Declaration of Independence, Washington asked a friend to catch some buffalo calves for him because he was kicking around the idea of raising a herd and marketing cloth made from the wool. During the Revolutionary War, Washington corresponded with his officers about killing buffalo in order to feed troops. In the winter of 1780–81, officer Daniel Brodhead wrote to Washington about the lack of game in the vicinity of Fort Pitt. He warned Washington, “I have risked the sending of a party of hunters to kill buffalo at Little Kanawha,” an Ohio River tributary that flows through western West Virginia, “and to lay in the meat until I can detach a party to bring it in, which cannot be done before spring.”

  After the war, in 1784, Washington made a westward trip to check on his Pennsylvania landholdings. He was a surveyor by training, and on his way home he cut through western Maryland to scout out possible routes for a canal system that could connect the Virginia coast with the Ohio River. (It was never built.) He got lost on an obscure trail called McCulloch’s Pack Horse Path, which, Washington wrote in his diary, “owes its origen to Buffaloes, being no other than their tracks from one lick to another & consequently crooked and not well chosen.”

  The trail is especially obscure nowadays, because no one knows where it began or ended, or how exactly it got its name. Generally, it’s accepted that the buffalo trail passed close to Gorman, West Virginia, and then snaked its way north and west across Garrett County, Maryland, before passing back into West Virginia and heading off toward the Ohio River. I wanted to see it, but I knew I didn’t stand a chance of finding it without some help. The Garrett County Historical Society put me in touch with the Reverend John A. Grant, who wrote an unsigned article about the path in 1948. Grant was now eighty-four years old, a clergyman for the Episcopal Church. I made arrangements to meet him at a crossroads in two weeks, and when I called on the morning of our appointment to make sure he remembered, he acted as though it was the most superfluous phone call that he’d ever received in his entire life.

  Grant drives a Buick and wears a style of hat commonly worn by churchgoing old men, with a bill that snaps to the body of the hat. His skin looked as pale and thin as wax paper, and was textured like wax paper that had been wadded up and then smoothed back out again. He was born and raised in Oakland, Maryland. “I had the most fortunate childhood,” he told me. His father took him hiking and taught him a lot about history. He liked to be outside as a kid, so he slept on his porch in the summertime and the birds woke him up very early in the morning, before his family was stirring. “That’s how I became a voracious reader,” he said. Under his mattress, he kept books about ancient Hebrew, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Scandinavian runes. When World War II started, he enlisted for pilot school. He was nearby when the first atomic bomb was tested in New Mexico, and he heard a rumor that the explosion was from a munitions train blowing up.

  Grant appreciates the small coincidences of history, the places where the past and the present collide with some sort of tangible, visible result. Outside of Oakland, he showed me a dipping well where George Washington once drank water. Grant dipped up a handful and tasted it. “That’s good water,” he said. “No wonder Washington drank that.” In downtown Oakland he showed me some railroad tracks and the exact location of a train depot used by Confederate agents to move contraband during the Civil War. Whenever the Confederate sympathizers were loading supplies, they’d send beautiful women out to urinate in the bushes in order to distract the attention of Union agents.

  Next he showed me a place along a road where Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and the writer and conservationist John Burroughs got stuck in the mud in Edison’s Packard. A local man pulled them out with his Model T, and he advised Henry Ford to “get yourself a Ford.” Down that same road we passed a red log cabin with a late-model Chevy 4x4 in the driveway. Grant said that his friend lived there and drove that truck. Before he retired, this friend was deputized as a “federal agent” by the late Bobby Kennedy. Later, the friend was invited to the White House to receive an award. He shook hands with President John F. Kennedy, who asked him where he was from. “Western Maryland,” answered Grant’s friend.

  “Where in western Maryland?” asked the pre
sident.

  “Oakland,” said the friend.

  “I know Oakland,” said the president. “I ate buckwheat cakes next to the church.”

  Our final destination was the Herrington Manor State Park. Of the female rangers at the park’s entrance, Grant said, “They’re pretty tough hombres.” We drove down a park road that was shaded by thick timber. Grant stopped the Buick at a very arbitrary-looking place, stepped from the car, and invited me to inspect a piece of rock that he had picked up. I hadn’t really thought about how old he was until I saw his palm. “This rock we’re standing on,” Grant said, “was crushed with sledgehammers by workers with the Civilian Conservation Corps, a program founded by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Those workers lived in a camp here. We would come here to swim and watch them work.”

  He looked into the woods. There were many kinds of trees growing in the forest, including several that I was unfamiliar with. And there was the faintest trail coming through the trees. “I believe your trail, the trail that Washington followed, crossed this road here.” I walked up and down the road a few steps and looked around. I picked up one of the hand-crushed rocks and put it into my pocket. Birds chirped. I became worried that I’d someday lose the rock, and so I picked up another and put it into a different pocket. I looked back into the woods. It was hard to imagine a line of buffalo plodding single file through the undergrowth with George Washington coming behind them, but I stared until I could see them crystal clear.