American Buffalo (11 page)

“What do you think they were hunting for?” I asked.

“My guess—and this is just a guess—is bison,” said Kunz.

When I was hanging around with Kunz, I asked him what he thought was the absolute coolest thing that he could find in the Alaskan Arctic. He described for me an elaborate scenario by which a complete social unit of Paleo-Indian hunters was buried by a landslide twenty thousand years ago—“their clothes, their tools, their dogs, their food, everything”—and then encased in permafrost. Now, all of these thousands of years later, the earth’s warming atmosphere melts some of the ice. “And I’m flying along in my helicopter,” said Kunz, “and there’s a goddamned hand sticking up out of the ground. That would answer a lot of questions.”

Barring that rather stupendous development, work in the NPR-A comes down to the nuanced job of hunting arrowheads. I spent eight days doing such work with a sixty-two-year-old volunteer archaeologist named Tony Baker, a self-described “Indian arrowhead nut.” While Baker can’t remember how many states he’s hunted arrowheads in, he’s found them in over a dozen. His father, Ele Baker, found a flint knife at the actual Folsom site in 1936. His daughter, Traci, found a projectile point at the site in 1994—the last point to come out of the site. Together, Baker and I found dozens of artifacts. We found them on mesas, ridgelines, bluffs overlooking large river valleys—just about anywhere you could imagine yourself sitting and looking for animals. The artifacts were varied in their vintage and function: well-balanced knives that fit my hand as comfortably as a handshake; awls that could pass through my skin with the tiniest little push; and delicately crafted projectile points that seemed as though they were originally designed with the hope that they’d end up in a museum. Some of the stone tools we found were relatively new; Baker identified several as coming from an immediate cultural predecessor of the modern Eskimo. One day, while walking along a sharp ridge above an unnamed river, we found a style of projectile point that Baker described as a sluiceway. He believes such points could be very old, perhaps older than the points that Kunz found on the mesa. It was almost as long as my index finger; in cross section, it had a lenticular shape. I lay on the ground and stared at the point for fifteen minutes or so, turning it in my hands and thinking of all the things that will never be known. Was the person who made this point pleased with how it turned out? What did his clothes look like? How did he comprehend the scale of his landscape? What were his ideas of God? Was he often afraid? How did his people dispose of their dead? Which did he enjoy more, mammoth meat or buffalo meat?

I placed the point back into its divot in the ground as carefully as if it were a baby bird. The archaeologists in the NPR-A simply record and photograph their findings; the artifacts are left in place. If the archaeologists find an abundance of projectile points of an appropriate shape, they will dig in search of datable materials such as charcoal or bone. When and if that work begins, it could be big news. Mike Kunz believes that there could be ten thousand years’ worth of missing human history in Arctic Alaska; man may have entered the New World as long as twenty-five thousand years ago, or ten thousand years earlier than any scientifically accepted dates for human occupation. “They’ve found a site in Siberia that’s thirty thousand years old,” explained Kunz. He was referring to the Yana site, where human hunters camped in the ice-free floodplain of Siberia’s Yana River. They left behind the butchered remains of woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, wolf, bear, lion, hare, and Eurasian steppe bison. “Granted,” Kunz went on, “those people didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘Fred, let’s go to America.’ But they were on their way, and they were close. There was a dryland passage between continents at the time. For thousands of years there may have been only ten groups of twenty people in all of northern Alaska. That’s a wild-ass guess, mind you. And there’ve been several thousand more years of history to wash the evidence away. But we could find them. I think we will find them. It’s just a matter of time.”

Author lounging at the foot of what was once the Bering Land Bridge. Western Brooks Range, Alaska, July 2006.

HERE’S A SLIGHTLY CONTROVERSIAL
, fairly easily challenged version of events that just might be true: Humans first crossed into Alaska sometime around twenty thousand years ago, and the tools of these first immigrants did not readily resemble the projectile points that Folsom hunters used to kill buffalo, or that Clovis hunters used to kill mammoth. Instead, they hunted a similar suite of animals with projectile points that were certainly different, and perhaps more varied and less intricate. These first Americans were prevented from moving southward by the glacial ice sheets spanning central Canada—the same types of ice sheets that had prevented the southward migration of buffalo some hundred thousand years earlier. In the meantime, additional humans, with other technologies, continued to arrive from Siberia sporadically for thousands of years. Northern Alaska and portions of northern Canada became a cultural incubator, or a melting pot. As the climate changed, the hunters continued to develop a tool kit and hunting method that were specifically tailored to the conditions, raw materials, and animals of North America. Soon their projectile points looked like nothing found anywhere else in the world. They had evolved into what we now know as Paleo-Indians.

By fourteen thousand years ago, the Canadian ice sheets had receded enough to allow southward human migrations. As people moved south, they encountered more animals and perhaps the weather became nicer. The first people to arrive mid-continent might have followed the Pacific coast with the aid of boats made from wood and skin, but it’s more likely that they traveled through an inland ice-free corridor that opened onto the Great Plains in the vicinity of Edmonton, Alberta, perhaps in the same general location where the buffalo first emerged. By the time of their arrival, they had assumed a cultural identity that we now know as the Clovis hunters.

The day that the Clovis hunters arrived was a very bad day for mammoths but, one could argue, a good day for buffalo. What happened stretches the limits of human imagination, but at the same time the evidence is utterly compelling. In short, what is known as the Rancholabrean Land Mammal Age came to a very sudden and dramatic close upon the arrival of man. The continent lost 50 percent of its large mammalian biodiversity. All existing species of land mammals weighing over four thousand pounds vanished; literally dozens of species between four hundred and four thousand pounds disappeared; all of the wonderful animals that we discussed earlier—the elephants, horses, saber-toothed cats, ground sloths, American lions, short-faced bears, camels, American cheetahs—all gone.
^*

Some people have argued—and continue to argue—that the preponderance of blame for these extinctions lies with global climate change. The earth entered the interglacial period that continues today, and it started to get very warm. Rain patterns changed and the land dried up. Mixed forests disappeared; large herbivores couldn’t adapt and died out; predators and scavengers had nothing to eat, so they died, too. If man had anything to do with it, they argue, he was simply there in time to mop up the stragglers.

The climate change theory has problems. First and foremost, most of these vanishing species had already survived dozens of glacial and interglacial episodes, some as severe as (or more severe than) the one that coincided with their demise. What’s more, the extinctions across North and South America followed a sequence that had already occurred across Europe, Asia, and Australia; that is, most of the large mammals on those continents vanished at a time that was contemporaneous with the arrival of man. In several cases, large mammals survived drastic climate change on remote islands where physical distance and isolation prevented colonization by man. While mammoths had vanished from North America and Siberia by twelve thousand years ago, they survived on Russia’s Wrangell Island until thirty-seven hundred years ago—right about the time that the island’s archaeological record begins. Ditto with a few Greek islands, where pygmy elephants survived until the arrival of man about four thousand years ago. Of course, Africa is a notable exception to this rule, because that is where man evolved and coexisted with large land mammals for millions of years. There was no
Surprise, we’re here!
moment. In Africa, man and beast adapted to each other’s presence.

In the 1970s, a statistician named James Mosimann and a paleoecologist named Paul Martin published a highly controversial set of ideas commonly known as the blitzkrieg hypothesis. Using complex statistical formulas, they argued that it was mathematically possible for a pioneering population of one hundred Clovis hunters to annihilate North America’s megafauna. The hunters were killing large mammals that had no prior experience with humans, and they exploited this advantage with devastating precision. Well fed and healthy, and without internecine warfare, the Clovis hunters could have doubled their population every twenty years. As their populations grew, and as game was extirpated, the hunters expanded their range in arcs of ever-increasing size. The expansion and its accompanying mammal extinctions terminated in the southeastern United States. Within just three hundred years of their arrival, the Clovis hunters could have totaled 300,000 people hunting across three million square miles. Within that time frame, goes the blitzkrieg hypothesis, the Clovis hunters could have killed a hundred million large mammals.

Everyone from climatologists to biologists has attacked the credibility of the blitzkrieg hypothesis for a plethora of reasons, but it remains the most cohesive picture of what happened to all the animals at the end of the Pleistocene. Often, people have a knee-jerk reaction to the hypothesis because it suggests that early Native Americans were not the great land stewards that our modern mythology would have us believe. Though the hunters probably had no concept whatsoever of the finiteness of the land’s resources, the archaeological record is replete with evidence of wastefulness and unsound game-management practices. At the Colby site in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, Clovis hunters slaughtered at least seven mostly immature mammoths and left much of the meat behind. They stacked the unbutchered remains in mounds and topped the mounds with the mammoths’ own skulls and tusks. The meat was never recovered. A couple summers ago I visited the Dent site along the South Platte River, just east of Colorado’s Front Range. Clovis hunters downed thirteen mammoths there, ambushing the animals along a deeply cut path leading to the river. The elephants ranged in age from two years old to forty-three years old, and archaeological evidence suggests that it was the second time such a thing happened in that same place. If we use the contemporary population dynamics of African elephants as a point of reference, it’s likely that the loss of thirteen mammoths from a single valley would have had major, long-term implications for the regional elephant population as a whole.

That the buffalo survived at all is something of a miracle, an ecological fluke. Many species that were smaller than the buffalo vanished with astonishing rapidity. Geneticists believe that buffalo went through a population bottleneck at or near the Pleistocene-Holocene transition; much of the animal’s genetic diversity was lost. Buffalo disappeared from Victoria Island, British Columbia, and Orcas Island, Washington. They vanished from southern Ontario and northern California. They vanished from Massachusetts and parts of Florida. Isolated, remnant populations of buffalo did survive for a while in Alaska and the Canadian Yukon, but they were ultimately doomed for extinction as well; after an approximate 200,000-year presence, these northern animals were gone before the time of Christ.

The Great Plains and eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains may be the only place on the continent where buffalo have existed in perpetuity since the arrival of man. The animals were probably helped along by a number of factors. Global climate change caused the expansion of arid grasslands into areas that had been mixed forest, which increased and improved available habitat. In addition, the disappearance of the massive herbivores, along with their accompanying hordes of gargantuan bears, cats, and lions, did for bison what getting rid of cats and rats would do for New York City’s mice: the decreased load of competitors and predators provided an ecological windfall for buffalo. In terms of geologic time, you could say that the animal made an overnight transition from just another moderate-sized grazer to the continent’s dominant, largest land mammal. And with the disappearance of the mammoth, it’s a no-brainer that the ancestors of the Clovis hunters would exploit this emerging resource. After all, you wouldn’t expect them to walk all the way back to Siberia.

                  8                  

E
ARLY THIS MORNING
, when I wake up on the alluvial fan where the Chetaslina River flows into the Copper, I try to adjust the rocks beneath the tent that are poking into my back and hips. Our body heat has loosened the ground, and I’m able to pry them out with my thumb. Then I lie in the darkness listening. I can hear Danny, Jessen, and Rafferty breathing under the hoods of their sleeping bags, each in his own rhythm, and I think about how they are leaving tomorrow. The tent will be a lot colder with just one person in it. It’s too windy to hear animals; a bear could be chewing on the tent zipper and I wouldn’t know it. Instead, I listen to the weather. The tautly stretched nylon of a tent broadcasts changing conditions much more dramatically than any radio or TV announcer. High wind sounds like a passing train. Breezes ruffle like a distant, wind-whipped flag. Light, wind-borne drizzle is transmitted as a collection of clean popping noises. A hard rain is a drumroll. Sleet comes in little slaps, like a hundred bored students bouncing sharpened pencils on their desks. A heavy snowfall comes as a drowsy, peaceful hush.

Under the noise of the wind, I hear an unusual version of these noises. It sounds like precipitation, but not any sort that I’m accustomed to. I always sleep with the strap of my headlamp wrapped around my wrist like a bracelet, and I turn it on to make sure no water’s coming in through the vent. Everything looks dry, and I doze off. When I wake up again an hour or so later, it’s just getting light out. There’s something in my mouth, and I realize that I’m unconsciously nibbling on glacial flour. My hair is gritty with the stuff. I wipe my hand against my nose and see that my snot has turned as black as graphite from breathing it in. A glance outside the tent’s door verifies what I suspect. The ground is dry, and our tent is getting windblasted by dustlike particles that can crawl into places that an ant couldn’t get to.

I was hoping to get an early start walking up the Chetaslina, but we decide to move our camp into a nearby willow patch that is sheltered from the wind by a stand of spruce trees. Danny and I clear a large area for the tent, removing any rocks bigger than a golf ball. The ground is too rocky to drive tent stakes into, so we anchor the tent in place by padding large rocks with life jackets and placing them in the inside corners. Then we run guy-lines from the corner grommets of the rain fly out to thick stubs of drift logs that we mound with rocks. It’s stable enough that it will rip apart before blowing away. Once it’s all set up, I walk over to the tent’s original location and scatter the anchoring rocks so it looks like we were never there.

Buffalo tracks in Wrangell–St. Elias.

By the time our backpacks are loaded and we’re heading upriver, I can see wisps of clouds blowing between me and the spruce trees that are just a hundred yards away. Swirls of snowflakes fill the air. Unlike the banks of the Dadina River, the banks of the Chetaslina are wide open and parklike. I remark that you could push a baby stroller through here. We travel upriver about a half mile and then veer slightly inland on a well-used game trail that heads away from the river’s course like the hand of a clock that’s pointing at the two. I notice a few sets of buffalo tracks in the trail that seem much fresher than any we’ve seen so far. I point them out to the guys. “They aren’t
fresh
fresh,” I whisper, “but they aren’t months old, either.” Without discussing it, we move farther and farther away from the banks of the Chetaslina; soon we’re a couple hundred yards inland from the high-water mark. We’re trespassing now, plain and simple, but my curiosity about the buffalo tracks is getting the best of me. The trail passes through a thick stand of spruce. I can see an opening in the trees out ahead of us, and the trail goes toward it.

We emerge in a small meadow that has been trampled so thoroughly by buffalo hooves that it looks like it was tilled by a tractor. The ground is covered with red fescue, sedges, and prairie sagewort, all grazed down to a level that reminds me of a golf course putting green. The scattered willows are snipped back like bonsai trees. A traveler passing through Appalachia in 1784 compared such buffalo-grazed ground to land that had been ravaged by an invading army, and he compared the size of well-used buffalo trails to “public roads in a populous country.” At first I think I’m looking at a place where a group of starving buffalo herded up for the winter, but there is evidence suggesting that the buffalo must have spent part of their summer here as well. There are buffalo wallows all over the place, big bowl-shaped excavations in the ground that look almost like birdbaths measuring eight to twelve feet across. Buffalo scratch the wallows into the ground with their horns and hooves, turning the soil into a fine powder. They roll in the dry dirt or, if it’s wet, the mud. No one knows for sure why buffalo use wallows, though they do so most often in the summer. Maybe the dirt helps them keep cool; maybe it repels bugs. During breeding season, a rutting bull will piss in a wallow and then coat himself in the piss-wet dirt before challenging another bull to a fight.

I lose the tracks in the meadow, so I cut a couple half circles to pick them back up again. I’m looking around for the tracks when Danny says, “You hear that? An airplane.” Once I stop to listen I hear it as well, the distant drone of a single-engine aircraft. It comes into view, flying low beneath the clouds along the Copper River. It’s about a mile off. “That might be Bushpilot Dave’s Super Cub,” I say. Danny finds the plane in his binoculars. “No, that’s not Dave’s.” It would be almost impossible for the pilot to see us, but we each step beneath a tree to hide until the plane passes from view.

Author lying in buffalo wallow near the confluence of Chetaslina and Copper rivers.

We pick the fresh tracks up where the trail passes from the meadow and goes through a thick stand of spruce. I start down the trail until I can see another meadow ahead of me. I turn to Danny. “Instead of busting through here and spooking something,” I say, “we should try to get up on that ridge and look down into this stuff.” I motion to Jessen and Rafferty to turn around. We follow another buffalo trail back to the river and resume our upstream course.

The ridge we want climbs out of the valley floor at an angle as steep as a staircase. It’s like we’re climbing up the pointy end of a piece of pie, with the bottom of the left side of the piece being the Chetaslina River and the bottom of the right side being the Copper. A heavily used buffalo trail caps the spine of the ridge. There are no fresh tracks on it. A tree has fallen over the trail, and a two-foot section of the trunk is barkless and dented from getting hit by buffalo hooves as the animals scrambled over. A five-minute walk up the ridge puts us high enough above the valley that we can look down into the surrounding trees that we just came out of. We can see the meadows, but there are no buffalo in them.

Looking up the Chetaslina valley toward the Wrangell Mountains.

As we scan the area with our binoculars, Danny says, “There’s a black bear up there.” I look to where he’s looking, up on a distant hillside a bit higher than where we’re now standing. A small jet-black blob is messing around in a patch of reddish plants. I put my binoculars up.

“It’s eating juniper berries,” I say.

“It’s just a little one,” Danny says.

We move farther up the ridge until we’re standing on the crest of the Chetaslina River’s eastern rim and looking down toward the tumbling water. The drop is so severe that I’m careful not to get too close to the edge; I can picture the dirt crumbling away and sending me plunging down the hillside to break my neck. Far below us, at the bottom of the valley, the river’s channel is bordered by thick stands of conifers intermixed with patches of alder and willow. The valley climbs toward the glaciers in an almost straight line. In the distance, I can see where the trees end in the higher elevations. Beyond that, there is no valley at all, just enormous blocks of snow and ice vanishing upward into gray clouds. Just beyond the clouds and out of view, there are mountains so high that only microorganisms can live on them.

Directly across from me, the valley’s western wall rises out of the river bottom at a much more gradual pitch than the eastern wall. The slopes are mostly treeless, with vibrant growths of low shrubs and grasses. The crest of the ridge is flat and broad, and capped by birch trees and mountain ash. Small springs have cut deep, gash-like drainages into the hillside. Thin bands of spruce trees grow in the drainages, like privacy curtains between sections of meadow. The bands of spruce are spaced a couple hundred yards apart; looking at the long hillside, I am reminded of marks on a ruler. A dusting of snow has collected on the well-worn game trails traveling between the stands of spruce. If you were stalking an animal on that hillside, I think, those trails and the bands of trees would come in handy as travel routes and protective cover.

The vast majority of the ground that we’re now looking at is public land, open to hunting, and a lot of animals could be hidden out there in the mazes of meadows and timber. I sit down to begin picking the landscape apart with my eyes. Danny, Rafferty, and Jessen sit down next to me; our feet are dangling over the edge of the cliff, and we’re each holding a set of binoculars. Taken out of the wilderness context, we’d look like a bunch of guys watching a football game from a bleacher in the nosebleed section. Waiting and watching for animals is one of the most important parts of hunting. It’s not always fun, but I’ll sit for hours in anticipation of an animal revealing itself. While I wait, I’ll see strange and subtle things that I’d never notice if I was walking around: a coyote searching the debris field at the base of an avalanche chute and then stopping to scratch his muzzle with his rear foot; a grouse chasing a low-flying moth; a deer with a sore on its leg.