American Buffalo

by Steven Rinella

  I slip my rifle down from my shoulder and lay it quietly across my knee. I’m breathing slowly as I concentrate on the smells and the sounds of the woods. I move ahead a little more, picking my path very carefully to not make noise. I hear nothing but a distant chickadee and the gurgle of flowing water. The frozen ground is quiet against the knees of my wool pants. I move a little more and then stop. Away from the river, the forest is an impenetrable tangle of young spruce. The odor of the animals is no longer on the breeze. Just as I’m hoping that the buffalo didn’t head into the tangle, I hear it. A snapping twig. Then I hear another. I raise my rifle and glance through the scope, but I can’t find anything. I stand and take a few quick steps forward, and sure enough there’s a well-worn trail. I slide the rifle’s safety lever forward and place my finger through the trigger guard. The trigger finds its place inside the first joint of my finger. I take a few slow steps down the trail, my rifle raised, but the sound of snapping brush is moving away from me at too fast a clip. I don’t want to bust through the brush and take a running-away shot at a buffalo’s ass, especially if I can’t tell whether I’m looking at a cow or bull or calf or what. I back up and move downwind of the animals until I’m a couple hundred feet away from their trail. Then I start moving parallel to their route, picking my way through thickets of spruce and head-high alder. It’s slow going, but the last thing I want is to spook a herd of buffalo out of the area.

  If it was in fact a group of buffalo that I heard, I have no way of knowing how fast they are moving. My only real hope is that I’ll pass ahead of them in the valley floor and then be ready and waiting in case they move into the open meadows along the valley’s western wall. It takes me about forty minutes to get to the edge of the valley’s floor. I move slowly uphill on a very long and steep incline. I stop every few steps to look back behind me, down into the timber, to see if I can glimpse any movements. I watch for dark patches of fur, and I watch for shaking brush and moving treetops that might give a buffalo away. My field of view expands as I climb higher and higher, until I’m at the crest of the ridge and I can see down into many of the small meadows and willow patches that are scattered around the valley floor. I can see meadows along the hillside to my left and right. Scanning the surrounding country, I know that I’m looking at buffalo. I just can’t see them.

  When I take off my pack, the sweat on my back evaporates and cools my skin so quickly that I shiver. I position myself so that I’ve got a good view of most everything around me. Then I wait. A couple of hours go by, and nothing stirs except birds. It occurs to me again just how much activity you could miss out here in this timber. Hell, I just had at least one buffalo walking through the woods not seventy-five yards away and I never even caught a glimpse of it. At least I think it was a buffalo, I remind myself. I never actually saw it. But what else smells like that?

  COLONEL RICHARD IRVING DODGE wrote a book in 1877 titled The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants. In it, he closes his treatise on buffalo with a discussion of what he calls “mountain” or “wood” buffalo. “These animals are by no means plentiful,” Dodge writes, “and are moreover excessively shy, inhabiting the deepest, darkest defiles, or the craggy, almost precipitous, sides of mountains, inaccessible to any but the most practiced mountaineers. Unlike their plains relative, there is no stupid staring at an intruder. At the first symptom of danger they disappear like magic in the thicket, and never stop until far removed from even the apprehension of pursuit. I have many times come upon their fresh tracks, upon the beds from which they had first sprung in alarm, but I have never even seen one.”

  There are, in fact, two classifications of North American buffalo that are recognized (by some) today: there’s the wood buffalo of the Canadian boreal forests, and the plains buffalo of the Great Plains. The animals are separated by some minor variations; most notably, the hump of the wood buffalo is squarer in profile, and the wood buffalo’s hair is longer, darker, and straighter. Taxonomists once described the wood buffalo as a separate species altogether, with its own name. While the plains buffalo was Bison bison, the wood buffalo was Bison athabascae. However, modern genetic research has revealed essentially no difference between the two.

  Still, the apparent morphological differences between the two are exploited for good cause by those who would like to expand the range of buffalo in northern North America. Bob Stephenson, a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, has been working on a decades-long project to introduce wood buffalo from Canada into the Yukon Flats region north of Fairbanks. Stephenson prefers to call it a reintroduction, arguing that the buffalo was extirpated from that region by human hunting. Opponents to the plan argue that historical evidence of wood buffalo in that area is scant and that there’s no concrete evidence that they were killed off by humans. To put them back would be to tamper with Mother Nature’s grand, inscrutable plan. To be honest, I don’t think it really matters where these buffalo actually lived or how they died. The Yukon Flats are capable of supporting what might become America’s largest herd of free-ranging buffalo; the sooner that happens, the better.

  Of course, when Colonel Dodge talked about wily buffalo living in the mountains, he didn’t know about genetics and he didn’t know about Bob Stephenson. What he did know was that buffalo tended to behave in different ways depending on where they lived, and his theories about this were repeated and fortified by many other writers and observers who were infinitely familiar with the animals. Buffalo were sometimes excessively shy in the presence of humans, taking off at the slightest whiff of man, or else they could be tame enough to let a person walk up in plain sight and shoot them with an arrow. Generally, buffalo living in a mountainous or wooded habitat, be it Pennsylvania or Canada’s Northwest Territories, were much warier of humans than buffalo living in the open country of western Kansas or eastern Montana.

  Often, people discuss various animals’ responses to humans in terms of intelligence. Big white-tailed bucks are “smart” because they’re so wary of humans, but buffalo are “dumb” because they’re not. This is a flawed way of thinking about animal behavior, because it operates on the assumption that animals evolved with the sole concern of avoiding human predation—the smart ones figured it out, the dumb ones didn’t. In fact, many animals put a much greater emphasis on energy preservation and territorial defense than they do on avoiding predators. It doesn’t necessarily suit an animal’s needs to burn precious calories by running like hell every time a predator appears, especially if the animal encounters a lot of predators that are unable to make successful attempts at killing it.

  Also, keep in mind that before man arrived in the New World, buffalo probably didn’t use running away as a defense mechanism, and in any case running away would have been a bad idea for a few reasons: first, many of their predators, such as cheetahs, lions, short-faced bears, and dire wolves, were ridiculously fast and probably couldn’t be outrun; second, a herd can only run as fast as its weakest members, and fleeing would have exposed the calves and pregnant females at the most vulnerable rearward position; third, they weren’t built for running. Remember, the bodies of North American buffalo were much larger before the arrival of man. Their horns were well over twice as long and quite a bit thicker. Instead of sweeping upward and backward, the horns had a more forward orientation. Such heavy headgear was suitable for facing off predators, and it wouldn’t do much good for a buffalo to turn its horns away in order to expose its bare, clumsy ass to a large predator with long teeth and sharp claws.

  When approached by the earliest human hunters, such as Clovis hunters, buffalo probably behaved in the same way that they do when encountered by wolves today. They gathered in defensive positions, often with mature males toward the periphery and females and calves toward the center. With their heads down and their sharp horns exposed, a pack of these giant buffalo would not have presented an inviting target for a bear or lion. But humans rendered that defense strategy obsolete—a human hunter just had to wa
lk up and start hurtling spears into the group. Buffalo slowly wised up to the risk, as is demonstrated by the gradual advancement in technology among buffalohunting people. It’s likely that buffalo initially developed a safety zone for humans that accounted for the distance that a man could hurl a spear. Then came the bow and arrow, and the buffalo probably increased the size of their safety zone. It was like a game of tit for tat that stretched on for millennia.

  The arrival of firearms eventually tipped the scales wholly in the humans’ favor. Think of a space alien movie, the kind where extraterrestrial invaders come to earth and use weapons of ridiculous potency to lay waste to humanity. In those movies, are the human protagonists portrayed as stupid? No, they’re portrayed as surprised and defenseless. By the end of such movies, the humans have usually wised up and learned how to avoid ray guns or expandable tongues, and in the end they turn the tides and survive. In most places, the buffalo weren’t given enough time for this happy ending. They were wiped out so quickly that they had no time to adjust to the risk of a predator that could kill them from five hundred yards away.

  In places, though, the buffalo did survive just long enough to learn how to avoid human predation: accounts of “wise,” “skittish,” “shy,” “wary,” and “smart” buffalo came out of such regions as central Canada, the high mountains of Montana, the Dakota badlands, and the remotest, most arid regions of the Texas Panhandle. These remnant and increasingly wild populations of buffalo may have survived and multiplied if they hadn’t been cursed by their own value—even when a regional population of buffalo was reduced to nearly nothing, it continued to make economic sense for human hunters to pursue them. The payoff warranted almost any amount of exertion. While a white-tailed deer might give a hunter fifty pounds of meat, a buffalo would yield ten times that amount or more. And the hides became all the more valuable as the animals disappeared. When there were still millions of buffalo in North America, hides were selling for a dollar or two. But when there were just a thousand or so left, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, the hides increased in value to hundreds of dollars on the souvenir market—or the equivalent of a month’s wages for a common laborer. No amount of wariness or intelligence on the part of the buffalo was going to save them so long as they had a price like that on their heads.

  Thanks to the modern conservation movement, which was in many ways initiated by attempts to save the buffalo in the early 1900s, the animals have protections that go beyond their own abilities to hide. You can no longer sell the meat of wild game animals, and the trafficking of hides is closely monitored by federal and state wildlife agencies. Would-be buffalo hunters are limited by the available number of permits issued for any given herd, which is usually a minuscule amount compared with herd size. The methodologies of those hunters are also limited, usually by dozens of laws that are meant to even out the playing field. Now, in the handful of areas where limited numbers of human hunters have been allowed to hunt wild herds of buffalo over the course of several years—Alaska, portions of central Canada, Utah’s Henry Mountains, the North Rim of Arizona’s Grand Canyon—both hunters and state wildlife agencies are seeing that buffalo are quite capable of getting smart.

  I can certainly attest to that, especially as I sit here with two freezing feet and six or seven numb fingers. I’m still watching over the timbered valley where, I believe, a suspected herd of buffalo has vanished into what Colonel Dodge referred to as one of those “deepest, darkest” defiles. I’ve been moving my eyes slowly across the land, and I feel as though the world has shrunk down to these few square miles that are below me. I’ve been sensing a change in the weather for an hour or so. The dry, cold air is becoming a little warmer, and there’s an increasing heaviness to it. It seems that the birds are more fidgety. Gray jays have been moving down valley. I’m looking down on them at a very slight angle, and their flight patterns form series of arcs across the backdrop of spruce.

  Earlier, the cloud cover was high and loosely packed, but it seems to have grown thick and dense. The clouds come to an abrupt end toward the northern horizon. As I watch them, something rather surreal happens; the sky to the north becomes completely clear, and for the briefest moment, just seconds, I can see the entire southern exposure of the mountain peaks. I’ve known that they were there, could even feel that they were there, but it’s stunning to actually see them for once. They stand like enormous paperweights whose job it is to anchor the world in place. There’s a beautiful sunset sprayed across their icy faces, which makes them seem even more vital. The wilderness seems to stretch out like it’s releasing a great breath. And then the clouds drop down again and hide the mountains, and it feels as if the world has inhaled until there’s nothing left but this small section of valley. The brevity of the view reminds me of times when I’ve spotted a cool seashell exposed for a glimpse in the reaches of a receding wave, only to have the next wave swallow it up.

  I’m still kind of stunned by the mountains when I catch a quick movement. A patch of brown. It’s almost at eye level on the hill that separates the Chetaslina River’s two branches. It’s maybe a half mile away, but still I lurch forward and grab at my rifle. Before I have time to get excited about what I think I see—a buffalo—I realize that I’m looking at not just one grizzly bear but two. They’re on an open avalanche slide, feeding on scattered clumps of rose hips. The slope is so steep that each of their steps sends down a small cascade of dirt and gravel. As I watch the bears, I see the first flakes of snow come falling down from the clouds. They’re big wet flakes, and within a few minutes I can’t see anything except the thirty yards of ground at my feet.

  I figure that I should find a place to spend the night. If the snow lets up, I’ll come back here and wait until it’s too dark to see. I take my backpack and move into the timber. I only have to go a stone’s throw and I’m sheltered by thick trees. Even back here away from the trail there’s a lot of buffalo sign. I look around for a smooth flat place to lay out my sleeping bag, and I find the perfect spot in the bottom of a wallow. The wallow is sheltered beneath a large spruce and the snow hasn’t even begun to collect in the smooth dirt of the bowl. I kick away a few buffalo chips whose density suggests that they might be good fuel.

  I get a strong smell of buffalo when I drop to my knees to unload my pack. In the dust on the bottom of the wallow I can see the perfect imprint of a buffalo’s knee, and also the smoothly pressed soil where its flank rested.* On the Texas plains, a white hide hunter was shot to death in the bottom of a wallow in the 1870s. Comanche Indians caught him on flat ground, and he apparently tried to sink into the wallow for shelter while defending his position. It wasn’t quite deep enough. The Indians probably gave no more thought to killing him than cowboys would give to killing cattle rustlers.

  Author’s camp on “Buffalo Ridge,” above the Chetaslina River, October 2005.

  I empty out my pack, putting everything up against the base of the spruce where it’s sheltered from the falling snow. I pull out the buffalo chips that I’ve been carrying around and stack them with the chips that were already beneath the spruce. I’ve got a nice pile of about a dozen good ones, plus there are plenty of dry sticks lying about. My tarp is rectangular, six feet by eight feet, with grommets in each corner. I use two short pieces of cord to stretch one end tight up against the trunk of the tree about waist high. I tie the opposite corners to the bases of small saplings so that the tarp is pitched sharply with the low end facing the wind. That’s the end where I’ll put my feet; my head will go at the high end so that the condensation from my breath doesn’t collect on the tarp and drip back down on me. I cut a long pole with my Leatherman and rig it under the tarp like a ridgeline so the snow runs off to the sides instead of sagging down in the middle.

  As soon as the tarp is up, I clear the snow out from underneath its edges and stretch out my sleeping bag. Toward dusk the air seems to get a little warmer again; the snow is wetter and heavier than before. I wonder where those bears are now. I’ve got
an old bird’s nest in my pocket and a cardboard tube that I saved from inside a used-up roll of toilet paper. I shred them up and top them with dry spruce twigs. The fire takes off, and I lean a couple of my primo buffalo chips against the burning twigs. The chips catch quickly, and I’m surprised to see them burn beautifully like coal. It’s my first good buffalo chip fire, and I feel that I’m learning something out here. I can’t say that there’s some higher power in this world that doles out justice and penance, but, at least in the wilderness, good things do seem to come to those who wait. As I slink down into my sleeping bag and watch the deeply glowing embers of my fire, I feel like I’m fulfilling my part in some sort of cosmic agreement. I’m happily waiting. And tomorrow’s going to be a big day, I just know it.