American Buffalo (12 page)

My eyes scan the opposite ridge, and I blurt out, “Holy shit, there’s some buffalo. Four of ’em, straight across and passing left to right.” The bulls are passing out from behind a band of spruce trees. They’re walking in single file, with about a buffalo’s length between them. They seem very deliberate in their travels, as though they’re going somewhere that is well known to them. The animal in front is clearly the biggest, an old bull. I pull out my spotting scope and center the bull in the lens. The animal is well beyond rifle range, just under a mile away. Still, I can see the details of the animal, the small characteristics that make it an individual creature rather than just a representative of a species. Its mane is chocolate brown, tangled, and curled. Its rump is darker. William Hornaday described the color of a buffalo’s flank as “between a dark umber and liver-shining brown.” Several characteristics, beyond sheer size, distinguish the appearances of male and female buffalo. The base of a cow’s horn, where it comes out of her head, is about the size of her eye socket; a bull’s horn has a much greater circumference than his eye socket. Another thing is the penis sheath that extends downward at a forward angle from the bull’s belly. The penis hangs in the bottom of the sheath like a roll of quarters in a Ziploc bag. The tip of the sheath is adorned with a long tuft of hair, which probably protects the tip of the bull’s penis from freezing temperatures. The tufts are usually clumped into a single strand from frequent wettings by urine. When erect, the reddish pink penis extends out of the sheath like what happens when you turn the base of a lipstick tube.

The buffalo’s slowness reminds me of an old man crossing rough ground. The animal moves methodically, placing each foot as though unsure whether its legs will hold up or not. Of course, this slowness is deceptive. A buffalo is perfectly capable of moving with great agility when it needs to. A buffalo can clear six feet in a standing high jump and fourteen feet in a standing long jump. At a run, buffalo can hit thirty miles per hour, and there are reports of them clocking out at forty miles per hour. A good horse can outsprint a buffalo, but just about any buffalo could beat any horse in an endurance run. The animal’s oversized trachea, which plays a role in heat regulation, also helps it during periods of extreme exertion. A buffalo’s tongue moves forward when it runs, opening the passage to increase the amount of oxygen that can come into the lungs. Also, when you look at a buffalo, you’ll notice that it has a knee-like joint about one-third of the way up its leg. That’s actually the heel of its foot; the hoof is the toe. The long, incredibly strong tendons between the heel and the toe stretch every time the buffalo’s foot hits the ground, and the springlike retraction of that tendon allows the animal to recover 40 percent of its running energy. I sometimes think of buffalo as souped-up hot rods that are hidden inside minivan shells.

A few months earlier, in the late summer, the four bulls that I’m now watching were probably busy knocking the shit out of each other. Bull buffalo hit sexual maturity at age three, but they usually are not successful in breeding until their sixth year. (Females mature between the ages of two and four.) During their peak breeding season, usually a span of two weeks in midsummer, they engage in vicious bouts of head-butting and pushing contests as they compete to breed with as many females as possible. In any given day during breeding season, there will be scores of fights among a herd, and 5–6 percent of the bulls will die each year from battle wounds sustained from horn goring. One in three mature bulls can expect to have at least one rib broken in fights during its lifetime. When a male buffalo ejaculates during intercourse, his abdominal muscles flex so violently that his back hooves lift off the ground and the entirety of his two thousand pounds comes to rest on the haunches of the one-thousand-pound female. Females carry their fetuses for approximately 285 days and give birth from mid-April to May. The calves are bright reddish tan.

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 it 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.
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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?”