American Buffalo

by Steven Rinella

  I’ve never met Hardcore Jeffy before, but I’ve certainly heard stories about him. His name often pops up in Anchorage outdoors social circles. At forty-seven, he’s fifteen years older than most of his friends but also in better shape. No one ever talks about getting drunk with Hardcore Jeffy or of providing Hardcore Jeffy with a shoulder to cry on. Instead, stories involving Hardcore Jeffy are invariably set in uncomfortable wilderness circumstances, and they usually involve an anecdote or two about Hardcore Jeffy’s obsessive gear-organizing tendencies. Jessen and Hardcore Jeffy were once stuck inside a snow cave on a climbing trip that was interrupted by a blizzard. Hardcore Jeffy managed the cave’s organization right down to the frozen Baggies of human waste. Jessen once called Hardcore Jeffy on the phone and caught him in the midst of dipnetting sockeye salmon. During the conversation, Hardcore Jeffy had to excuse himself for a moment to scold his dog. Jessen heard him holler, “Georgia, you’re fucking up the system!”

  Jessen and Hardcore Jeffy had anticipated the situation I’m in, or at least they hoped I was in. They’d brought along two Alpacka pack rafts, which are small Alaska-made inflatable boats that are five and a half feet long and weigh less than a house cat. Inflated, pack rafts resemble a pool toy for little kids, if kids’ pool toys cost $800 and came with advice on hauling moose meat and a warning about puncturing the hull on mine tailings. I’ve never been in a pack raft, but I’ve been warned about them. My two brothers once flew thirty miles into the Alaska Range with their rifles and backpacks and a pair of pack rafts. They carried their pack rafts with them while they hunted in the mountains for a week. After killing a Dall sheep, they hiked back down to the river and started floating out. Within five miles they’d capsized a raft and nearly lost their sheep. Matt’s life jacket turned up missing. So they deflated the rafts and started walking with the dead sheep and the boats strapped to their backs. After twenty-five miles of hiking, they emerged on the Parks Highway and picked up a cell phone signal to call a taxicab in the town of Healy. Matt came away with the impression that pack rafts are best treated as what they appear to be: pool toys. I express this reservation, but Jessen and Hardcore Jeffy assure me that the pack rafts are tickets to ease. We could either spend two full days arduously hauling meat down the banks of the Chetaslina to the Copper, they say, or else spend a couple hours floating the meat down the canyon. They describe all of the dozens of rivers they’ve floated without suffering a single drowning incident.

  In truth, there isn’t really a decision for me to make. Hardcore Jeffy has to get back to work; he’s already spent one full day on the Copper River getting this far, and we have to spend another day on the Copper to get out of here. There’s no time for screwing around. After organizing our gear and getting the big raft secured on the bank with ropes, we strap the deflated, rolled-up pack rafts to our backs and begin heading upriver. The sun’s setting by the time we get back up to the meat cache. It’s already been a pretty long day for me, and I’m feeling suspiciously cold. My clothes got wet from sweat and exertion. The sun’s dropping, and the temperature is going along with it. I pull on some extra clothes and zip up my dry suit, but I’m still shivering.

  The buffalo’s front shoulder makes the inflated pack rafts look like something a buffalo might use as water wings. Hardcore Jeffy is undeterred by this, and we begin fitting the pieces and parts of the buffalo into the rafts. Getting everything to fit is like trying to put kernels of corn back on a cob. The legs are frozen stiff and can’t be arranged very well, and we try a dozen configurations before settling on a haphazard arrangement by which meat is mounded twice as high as each raft and lashed down with a woven network of rope. We lash the hide to one of the pack rafts, and I lash the skull to the front of the other. Now each boat has about 350 pounds aboard. When I try to yank the loaded pack raft into the river, I can’t even get it to budge. We all three grab the lines on the raft and do a 1-2-3 count before yanking it toward the water. A dozen or so of these yanks and we get the first raft out into the current. It floats, with just a few inches of freeboard. We get the other raft into the water, and I secure the collar on my dry suit and step into the river.

  The current is gushing at the highest rate it will hit all day. The slush from the morning is gone, but with the temperature dropping back down, it’s freezing over again. The quiet water along the edges of the river is forming into ice that looks like honeycomb, and the boulders in the river are getting capped in opaque layers of frozen froth that remind me of shower caps from cheap motels. Starting out, we’ve got this idea that we’ll take it slow and easy. Because Hardcore Jeffy doesn’t have his dry suit, he’ll stay on the bank with the rifle and a headlamp for shining into the river in case we hit a problem in the dark. Jessen and I will guide the loaded pack rafts along the river’s edge with ropes.

  It takes me approximately thirty seconds to see that this plan is utter nonsense. I step out into the river with my wrist tethered to the pack raft by a length of rope. As soon as the current grabs the raft, it feels like I’m trying to walk a pack of mastiffs. Rather than me guiding the raft along, the raft is yanking me. And its path is not the path that I want to take. I’m plunged into water up to my chest. The rope is wrapped around my wrist, and the pack raft feels like it’s going to take my hand and my glove with it. If I let go, who knows how we’ll catch the thing. I yell to Jessen, but he’s having the same problem. As I bounce along behind the boat, I manage to scramble toward the bank and get my feet locked behind a big boulder. I lean into the rope and steer the raft toward another rock. It beaches, and then a wave of water rushes over the rubber gunwale. The raft manages to stay afloat, but only in the way that a piece of wet bread manages to stay afloat when you toss it into a duck pond.

  I climb onto the bank and struggle to open my suit. I must have gone into deeper water than I’ve been in yet, because my clothes beneath the suit are wet, especially around the waist, and now water is trickling down into my socks. I try to find the leak. It looks like the seam near the belt line is shot and letting water in. Stupidly, I zip back up and stumble into the water again. As I’m yanking on the raft to get it off the rock, I see that ice is forming on the outside of the meat bags. If I punch the blocks of meat, ice breaks away like paper-thin shards of glass. I make several more attempts to guide the raft downriver with the ropes, but each attempt leads to me being dragged over rocks and filling my dry suit with even more water. It’s darker now, and I can’t see how deep the water is. The bottom of the river drops out from my feet, and I wrap my fingers under one of the ropes securing the load. I kick in the water as I try to pull myself up. I get my armpits up over the raft, and I’m clinging to it like someone holding on to a life ring in the ocean. If I climbed in, the high center of gravity would flip the raft for sure. Everything below my armpits is underwater, and my dry suit continues to fill up, but at least I’m not busting my knees open while getting dragged across rocks. I shoot down the river at a good clip and pass up Jessen as he’s struggling to get his raft off an exposed rock. We’re in a rapid, and the current’s roaring loudly. Hardcore Jeffy must have had to go around some obstacle or another, because I haven’t seen him or the LED beam from his light.

  After a half hour of floating along, kicking off rocks, and trying to keep the pack raft from capsizing, I can hardly feel my legs. I send messages to them, but the messages don’t instantly compute. I’ll tell the legs to move down and catch the bottom of the river, but they don’t do the motion with any vigor. This ain’t good, I tell myself. The next time I hit a slow, shallow spot, I dig my knees into the bottom and stop the raft in a calm pocket of water behind a rock. The rope trailing in the water is as stiff as heavy-gauge wire and my hands will barely work, but I manage to get the rope looped around the rock well enough to hold it in place. I’m in the shallow water, on my hands and knees. I’ve got a pair of rubber pipe fitter’s gloves on, and they’re all full of water and cold. I can’t even see across the river. Holy shit is this stupid, I think.


  I get my legs in place beneath me and walk awkwardly up to the gravel bar. I attempt a few half-assed jumping jacks, but it feels like someone forced steel reinforcement rods into the hollows of my bones. I walk up and down the gravel bar, stiff as a robot, keeping an eye on the river to see if Jessen comes floating past. There are flakes of ice forming on my clothes. I stumble around for five minutes and never see him. I can’t tell if I’m getting colder or warmer. I wonder if Jessen somehow passed me up, and now he and Hardcore Jeffy are below me and I’m up here freezing my ass waiting for them. But how could they be below me? I passed Jessen. Or didn’t I? I realize that I’m not thinking too clearly. The cold’s getting to my head. How long have I been in the water? An hour? I haven’t even passed where the two forks of the Chetaslina come together. Why is this taking so long? I start thinking how thirsty I am. I know that’s not a good sign, but I honestly am thirsty. Or maybe I’m not. I think about a beer. A beer and a cold glass of water. It occurs to me that I could drink the water right here, out of this river, but that water looks too goddamned cold. I stumble back out to my raft. My backpack is lashed to the load. The knots holding it down are frozen and bound up. I try to snake my hand inside the pack to feel around for my water bottle. As I’m groping for it, I realize that there isn’t any difference. Just drink any water. Then my thirst fades and I’m consumed again by how cold I am. I feel for the Ziploc bag with my waterproof matches and a lighter, but everything’s soaking wet. Finding it seems impossible. Nothing feels like plastic in there. Besides, my fingers are way too numb to work a lighter. I could start walking down the riverbank, but then I’d have to leave everything here and risk the grizzly situation all over again.

  I undo the rope, grab the raft, and kick off into the current. I hear Jessen let out a whoop ahead of me. Through the darkness I see him bucking over the waves. He’s going right down the middle, where the current stands up in a frothy strip like the hair on the back of a pissed-off dog. Jessen vanishes ahead of me. I realize that we’re in the narrowest part of the canyon, where the river passes beneath a steep cliff. It’s deep from here on out. My boat’s pulled into the same route that Jessen took and it pulls me along with it. I try to put my feet down to grab the bottom, but they just bounce off the rocks like I’m dragging two big hunks of firewood from my torso. My hands are frozen into two hooks. The hooks are latched onto strings. The thirst comes back really hard until I feel like I’m dying of thirst. The pain in my feet is gone; there’s nothing there now, just numb, tingling blocks. Several times I hit boulders that I think are going to capsize the raft and sink me under, but somehow the rubber bounces off and stays upright. Another rock smacks into my knees, but it feels like a dull thud, no different from if it smacked one of the buffalo’s legs up in the boat.

  Now I’m just hanging on, going where the water tells me to go. My boat gets hung up in a back eddy beneath the cliff, and I swirl there for a few minutes; in all, I’ve been in the water two hours now, and I imagine spinning here until daybreak. The river grabs me out of the back eddy like someone pulling a piece of laundry from a still-spinning clothes dryer. I continue downstream, trying to imagine what I’ll do when I float past camp. How will I stop the boat before I float into the Copper and on toward the Pacific Ocean? But I can’t really grasp the concept of it. It’s almost like I’m in a dream and can’t wake up. I shoot through a fast stretch of water, and I see a large cliff looming ahead of me. I don’t remember that cliff, and I can’t tell where I am, but I hear Jessen yelling, “Whoa! Stop! Stop!” He’s got his boat beached on the bank of the river. I realize that I’m looking across to the other side of the Copper. We’ve made it down to camp! The Chetaslina is loud and rushing here, and I shoot past Jessen. I tell my legs to go down to the bottom of the river, to hook the rocks or drag along, but they won’t do it.

  I go over a gushing rim of water, and the Chetaslina spits me out into the darkened gray swirl of the Copper. It’s bottomless and perfectly quiet. There is no more gushing water, no more rocks bumping my legs. I think it’s still, too, but a patch of snow against the cliff goes shooting past, and I see that I’m moving quite quickly. My dry suit is full of water, a bucket made of fabric, and I wonder if there’s a life jacket in camp. I wish I had one. I can’t see anything up that way. No tent, no trees. I wonder where yesterday’s moon went. How did it get so dark? Again I tell my legs to do something, and again they don’t. I’m unbelievably thirsty, and while I realize that I must be very cold, I don’t actually feel cold anymore. I feel more like I’m ready for a long nap. The thought that I’ve got two arms and two hands comes to me as a sort of vague recollection. I leave one of those hands hooked to a rope and yank the other free. I use it to paddle, languidly at first but then with more gusto. It doesn’t seem to be helping. I feel exhausted, and I imagine falling asleep out here in the water. Where will I wake up? At the bottom of the river? And what will happen to the buffalo?

  15

  THE MOSQUITOES ARE THICK in the warm June air, buzzing around my ears and crawling across the mesh of my head net. Danny’s stretched out on the ground just ahead of me, belly down, his feet next to my head. His left pant leg has risen up to his calf, and the skin above the top of his boot is red and puffy from so many bites. I smash a cluster of the mosquitoes with my gloved hand and leave a tangle of broken legs and wings sticking to his sweaty skin. I tuck his pant leg back into his boot. Danny looks over his shoulder and motions me forward. I crawl along, following the crest of a beaver dam. The mosquitoes lift away from our clothes like dust rising from a shook rug. Once I move forward a few body lengths, I can see the direction that the buffalo are coming from. Off a ways, toward the river, a wallowing bull kicks up a poof of dry glacial flour. We hold steady, and soon I can see their backs coming in over the tops of the willows, heading into the wind and toward us. About fifty of them. Fist-sized clumps of chocolate brown wool are shedding away from their humps. Their tails swat back and forth, chasing bugs. As the herd draws near, I begin to see the reddish glimpses of what I’ve been hoping to find: buffalo calves. The closest should pass within a few yards.

  It’s been eight months since I killed the buffalo. My feet still aren’t right. When my weight is off of them, like now, I can feel the tingling numbness of frostbite creeping back into my toes and the backs of my heels. The sensation always reminds me of that cold night when I floated into the Copper River. Hardcore Jeffy climbed into the water and snagged the buffalo’s severed knee joint as I floated past. My ice-crusted pack raft swung around in the current downstream from his body, and he pulled me to the bank. I writhed on the floor of the tent while wrapped in sleeping bags, the heat moving back into me like a hot wire brush going through the veins of my legs.

  In the morning I was back on my feet. We rafted the meat and gear down the Copper River and then loaded it into a pickup near the village of Chitina. I spent the next three days at Danny’s house in Anchorage butchering the buffalo meat, converting the hunks of red flesh into wrapped and frozen steaks, roasts, sausages, and burgers. I minced the scraps of gristle and boiled them into dog food for my friends’ pets. I sawed the marrowbones into inch-and-a-half disks, then baked the disks on a cookie sheet until the fatty white insides spilled out like banana slugs; they tasted like buffalo-meat concentrate. I pickled the tongue and braised it in homemade sauerkraut from cabbages grown in my brother Matt’s garden. I sawed up the shank bones and made osso buco with my own homegrown tomatoes, then took the leftover bits of picked-clean bone and boiled them down into an assortment of stocks and glazes. I bleached the skull for a decoration and sent the hide to a commercial tannery.

  Finally, months later, I thawed out some bags of the carotene-rich fat and rendered them down into a few quart-sized jars of lard the color of diluted carrot juice. One night I took a handful of the liquefied fat and styled my hair into a wild shape, some kind of crazed buffalo warrior. By then I knew that I had to come back up here. Remembering the cold air and the deat
h of the buffalo made me want to witness the opposites, warmth and birth. Bushpilot Dave made two separate trips to fly Danny and me up the Chetaslina valley in his Super Cub, going low and slow at eight hundred feet. We traveled some twenty miles beyond the old kill site, all the way up to the herd’s summering grounds at the foot of the glacier. Dave dropped us off on a gravel bar with our backpacks and a couple days’ worth of food. We took a GPS waypoint on the improvised landing strip and then set off in search of the animals.

  Of the twenty-four hunters who were issued permits for DI454, only four of us killed a buffalo by the end of the seven-month season. The replacements for those animals are coming toward me now. There are a dozen calves in all, maybe more, though the adults are leading the herd. A young bull locks its eyes on me, some strange mound sticking out of a beaver dam. I don’t move, and I control my breath so that my back doesn’t rise and fall. When the bull goes back to eating, I can hear its teeth ripping the willow leaves. Its breath is like a soft snore, rising and falling. A calf passes so close that I could jump out and touch it, though that would likely get me a major ass kicking from its mother. It abandons a willow that it’s been nibbling in order to nurse. The cow is getting tired of this routine. She brings her back knee forward to smack his head and chase him off; the calf protests by charging back in. He bangs the top of his skull against her udder until she relents and lets her milk drop. The calf feeds frantically for a few seconds and then trots off away from the herd, bucking and kicking. It occurs to me that this buffalo calf has probably never seen a human. Most likely, a human has never seen it.