American Buffalo (3 page)

At the end of World War I, the American Bison Society conducted a census and counted 12,521 head in North America. The buffalo had been saved from extinction. Now conservationists who were once worried about too few buffalo were worried about too many. Yellowstone National Park couldn’t feed all of its, despite efforts to farm portions of the park and put up hay. It began slaughtering. The herd in Wainwright grew so rapidly the animals ran out of range. The Canadians slaughtered a thousand in the first batch and then continued butchering all through the 1920s. They turned the meat into pemmican—dried meat mixed with buffalo fat—and sold it at thirty cents a pound in ten-, twenty-, thirty-, or fifty-pound sacks.

The National Bison Range had similar problems. The founders of the range had thought that the land could support over a thousand head, but in truth it couldn’t hold half of that. By 1924, the range had been degraded by overgrazing. Surrounding cattle ranchers didn’t want wild buffalo running around and trashing their fences, so the range manager slaughtered a few hundred. In general, the public was uneasy with this large-scale buffalo killing. The practice brought back fresh memories from just thirty or forty years earlier, when the last of the millions were killed off for their hides during a ten-year bloodbath. Under pressure, the U.S. and Canadian governments began making room for them elsewhere. Most often, that meant toward the north. In 1925, Canada shipped buffalo to the newly founded Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Alberta, where the government had discovered a remnant wild herd of five hundred buffalo that had somehow survived the nineteenth century. Almost seven thousand buffalo left Wainwright, but no one knows how many survived the trip to the park; it’s been estimated that three thousand died in transit.

The U.S. territory of Alaska also acquired excess buffalo from the National Bison Range. The acquisition was spearheaded by a group of hunters from Fairbanks, Alaska. They had wanted to introduce Rocky Mountain elk to the region, but at the time no one was selling elk. They settled for buffalo and got a good deal. The range charged only for crating and shipping and sent up twenty-three head. The animals traveled by rail to Seattle, where they were loaded on a barge and shipped by sea up to Whittier, Alaska, near the base of the Kenai Peninsula. From there they rode the train up to Fairbanks and arrived on June 27, 1928. After a short stopover, the buffalo were loaded on trucks and driven a hundred miles to the southeast and let loose near their final destination, which is now the town of Delta Junction. Because Alaska was still thirty-one years away from statehood, the animals fell under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The government wanted to protect the buffalo herd until it was large enough to withstand a limited amount of hunting by humans. The plan worked: by 1940 Alaska had become home to upwards of five hundred descendants of Sam Walking Coyote’s buffalo.

It’s hard to say what might have happened to the buffalo herd if it had been allowed to expand without any constraints on its habitat, but in many ways World War II sealed the herd’s fate. The U.S. Army was looking to supply its Russian allies with a northern route that was safe from German and Japanese aerial assault. It established the Big Delta Army Air Field and started building highways to connect it to the Lower 48. People started moving in. After World War II, the airbase used to supply Russia became a key strategic point in our emerging national defense plan against Russia.

The buffalo herd’s habitat was being invaded by people. The animals destroyed the army’s landscaping. Large bulls, gone crazy with the hormones of breeding season, charged trucks. By 1950 the government was looking to get rid of some of the buffalo, and this time to a place where they wouldn’t cause any future hassles. That summer, employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rounded up seventeen buffalo from Delta Junction and herded them into a sturdy corral. They loaded the buffalo into trucks and drove them about 170 miles to the southeast, near the town of Slana, and then hauled them up the Nabesna Road.

On contemporary maps, the Nabesna Road is a dotted line next to the words “Closed in winter.” It leads into Wrangell–St. Elias, and the National Park Service describes it as “short on services but big on wilderness.” Somewhere along the road—no one knows exactly where—the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees released the buffalo. For the next ten years, the fate of the Nabesna Road herd was unknown. Reports of lone, wandering buffalo trickled in from various points across hundreds of square miles. There were rumors that the buffalo had been killed off by wolves and grizzlies. Some people thought that disease had killed them all. Eventually, though, the reported whereabouts of the buffalo herd started to focus in on a particular tract of wilderness about 130 miles downriver from the release site at Slana, or about fifteen hundred miles from where Sam Walking Coyote had originally picked up their ancestors.

This tract of land is now beneath Bushpilot Dave and me as we fly along in his Super Cub. I have a map of the area spread across my lap, along with a legal description of the hunt area. The area has a name, DI454, which comprises nine hundred square miles, or over a half-million acres. It’s described in terms of physical landmarks. I read the description to Bushpilot Dave: “East of the Copper River, south of the Nadina River, Nadina Glacier and Sanford Glacier, and west of the line from Mount Sanford to Mount Wrangell to Long Glacier, and west of the Kotsina River, and that portion of Unit 13D east of the Edgerton Highway.”

When I get done reading, Bushpilot Dave taps the left window and points to a canyon that slices through the forested expanse beneath us. “That’s the Nadina River,” he says. “You’ve got the Nadina Glacier up there at the head of it. In a second here we’ll be at the Dadina River. I hardly ever see them above the Nadina, but they’re fairly common below the Dadina.”

“How often do you see these buffalo?” I ask. “I mean, anywhere around here?”

“Depends. If they’re crossing a gravel bar or feeding in the willow patches, I’ll see them. But if they’re over in there”—Dave sweeps his hand across the vast forest to the east—“you don’t see them from up here. They’re big, but, boy, they can vanish on you. You’d have to get down in there and look. But I got to tell you, everything down here along the river is Ahtna, Incorporated land. Whatever you do about that is none of my business . . . I’m just telling you.”

Bushpilot Dave is referring to something that’s been plaguing me for the last few months. Right after receiving the news that I’d won the permit, I began studying up on the applicable rules as established by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. While some of the rules of the hunt were presented in terms of what you
may
do (you may kill a buffalo of either sex, and you have seven months, from September 1 to March 31, to do it), the bulk of the rules were in terms of what you couldn’t do. You
may not
: shoot from roads; use motorized vehicles (airplanes, boats, ATVs, snowmobiles, trucks, and so forth) to chase animals; use a helicopter in any way that has anything to do with hunting or transporting hunters or hunting gear; use a machine gun; use bait; pursue animals with the use of fire, artificial light, laser sight, electronically enhanced night vision scope, radio communication, cellular or satellite telephone, artificial salt lick, explosive, expanding gas arrow, bomb, smoke, or chemical; shoot buffalo while they are swimming; or hunt on the same day that you fly in a bush plane.

Those rules are all great, and they’re essential to a fair-chase hunt. However, I was floored when I received the following letter from the Department of Fish and Game:

My first thought was, Important land-access issues!? Private land!? Extremely limited? Before you
commit
to the hunt? What the hell? This is Alaska, for God’s sake. The Last Frontier, the Great White North, God’s Country, a state that is about 70 percent public lands. My dismay turned to disbelief, and I fired off my intent-to-hunt letter in hopes that I’d get some clarification. Then, in early August, I received a packet of information. On the enclosed map, the thousands upon thousands of acres of land within the DI454 area were colored green for public land (Wrangell–St. Elias) and orange for private property. The map was mostly green, except for strips of orange that bordered the Copper River on both sides. So that was the important land-access issue: if you were hunting by raft, which was the only way to do it, you couldn’t get from the river into the wilderness without crossing private land. It was as if you were allowed to travel on a highway and on the land alongside the highway, but you weren’t allowed to cross the shoulder.

The entity that owned all of this private property was Ahtna, Incorporated, one of thirteen regional corporations established under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971. The act distributed 44 million acres of land and $1 billion in cash to citizens who could claim at least one-quarter of native Alaskan descent. Rather than being paid out on an individual basis, the money and land were piled into large corporations that operate on a for-profit basis and issue shares to stakeholders. Ahtna, which holds over 1.5 million acres, is one such corporation. Because their profit-making ventures lean toward somewhat destructive extraction industries—mining, logging, highway construction, pipeline construction, rock crushing—I assumed that they probably wouldn’t care about something as comparatively benign as a guy cutting across their land. I wrote a letter to Ahtna explaining my predicament and asking permission. The letter went unanswered. I made several phone calls and left messages. No reply.

Then, one day in late August, I was thumbing through the
Anchorage Daily News
, and a large advertisement caught my eye. It was headed: “Notice to the Public.” The notice was from Ahtna, and it explained that they were going to throw the books at anyone who dared to “hunt, camp, fish, pick berries or park any type of vehicle on Ahtna property.” They promised that they’d be stepping up patrols for trespassers throughout the fall and that their lands would be “heavily patrolled by air, land and water.” Violators could expect fines and ninety days in the slammer, and then face additional civil claims for damages.

This left me wondering what in the hell Fish and Game expected a fellow in my situation to do. As it turns out, their solution involves a law that makes it legal to travel through private property as long as one stays below the average high-water mark of a navigable river. On the Copper, the high-water mark is usually above the actual level of the river and includes many small islands and riverside willow thickets. Thus, you could feasibly find and shoot a buffalo that’s standing near the river. It seemed kind of cheap to try to float up on a buffalo; and even if I did, there was the risk that the wounded animal would run into the river and die out there. Then I’d be in trouble, because there’s no way that I’d be able to drag a wet, thousand-plus-pound animal out of the river before it washed away.

But there was one loophole, sort of, and that was one of the reasons that I am up here with Dave. Several streams, such as the Nadina, Dadina, and Chetaslina rivers, flow from the mountains and through the private land before dumping into the Copper River. If I can locate buffalo up one of these rivers, I’ll be able to follow the river below the high-water mark and perhaps access the public land. I’ve got a GPS unit on my lap, and I’m ready to punch in a waypoint at the sight of something . . . anything. But there’s nothing. Several times Dave takes the Super Cub in spiraling dives to check out suspected sets of fresh tracks and suspicious shapes, but we don’t see any convincing evidence of buffalo on public land. We’re forty minutes out now, or about forty miles, and this plane isn’t free. Even if we head back now, I’ll be looking at a few hundred dollars.

“Here’s the Chetaslina River,” says Dave. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen buffalo below this river.” He points out the left window, toward the head of the Chetaslina. “They do hang out between here and there, even up by those glaciers.”

“How far is that?” I ask.

“Twenty miles or so. They could be up there somewhere. They’ll stay in those hills until the weather gets too bad.” Dave circles around and starts following the Copper back up toward Glennallen. Along the way, I keep my nose scrunched against the glass in hopes of seeing buffalo along the Copper, but there’s nothing. This isn’t going to be so easy, I think. How am I going to find a buffalo? What am I going to do with the thing if I kill it? How will I get it back to the raft? How will I keep from getting busted on private land? How long will I be out here? I get the nagging though familiar sense that winning this permit was something of a curse. It’s as if someone who is obsessed with outer space were invited to go to the moon. Of course he’d have to say yes; he’d be a fool not to. But at some point the initial euphoria wears off, and then there’s nothing left but the fear of doing it.

                  4                  

W
HEN I FOUND
the buffalo skull on that September day in Montana’s Madison Mountains, I padded it carefully with a fleece jacket and strapped it to the outside of my backpack with a few bungee cords. There was something very enticing about the skull; it seemed so perfectly symbolic, as though it stood for much more than the one animal that died and left it behind. At night, sitting around the campfire, I stared at the skull so much that I started to feel like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when he finds the skull of his old friend Yorick and launches into a speech about how even the great and mighty can be reduced to dust.

My fascination with the skull was accompanied by a nagging curiosity about its rarity and value. I wondered whether it was cool in only a personal way, like a painting your niece makes for you, or in a more general and universal way, like that other people would be jealous. After a few days of lugging it around in the mountains, I finally got a chance to find out. I left my brothers and walked down Sentinel Creek to the trailhead where I’d parked my van. When I got there, I was happy to see a few guys loading some horses into a trailer. I figured they’d be a good audience for the skull; anyone who owns a horse is sure to understand the value of Western iconography. I handled the skull in such a way that they couldn’t miss it. Facing them, I unlashed it from my pack, loosened some dirt in the brain cavity with a stick, and poured the dirt out. Some small beetles and rodent-chewed pine nut husks spilled out as well. I held it up over my head to give the underside a careful study. I stayed in that position for some time, waiting for a collective
Good Lord! He found a buffalo skull!
But they said nothing.

This worried me. I started to think that maybe I hadn’t found a buffalo skull, and that I was getting all excited about some wayward domestic cow that had wandered into the mountains and died. Maybe it was a weird breed of cow with a weird-shaped head that I was unfamiliar with. I anxiously got in my van and drove down a long forest service road to its intersection with highway 287. I turned to the west. The road curved through the mountains for a while and then dropped down to the northern bank of Earthquake Lake. The lake began to form at 11:37 p.m. on August 17, 1959, when an earthquake along the face of the Madison Range dumped a mountainside into the Madison River. The debris completely blocked the river’s flow and buried nineteen people, mostly campers. The chimney on Old Faithful Inn, miles away in Yellowstone National Park, fell through the roof.

I drove through the earthquake’s debris field and entered the broad, grassy valley of the lower Madison River. When I got to the town of Ennis, the Madison River split away from the road to flow through Bear Trap Canyon. I continued along northward until I hit I-90, and then I headed west, crossing the Continental Divide and dropping down into the town of Butte, where I bought a bean burrito. From there I paralleled the headwaters of the Clark Fork River, which flows all the way to the Columbia River and into the Pacific Ocean. I drove through long expanses of ranchland punctuated by short spurts of town, looked at passing cattle, particularly the horned varieties, and was visited again and again by my pestering suspicion that I was driving around with a cattle skull on my front seat. Where the Clark Fork River receives the Blackfoot and Bitterroot rivers in the town of Missoula, I exited I-90, crossed over Rattlesnake Creek, and pulled in to my local public library. I grabbed
Skulls and Bones,
by Glenn Searfoss, from the stacks, checked the index, and turned to page 32. There it was, the same thing that I’d dug out of the ground. I’d found a buffalo skull.

I hung the skull from my living room ceiling by a length of nylon cord. At night, with the floor lamp next to it, the skull would cast a huge shadow against the opposite wall, as big as a buffalo. When one of my housemates slammed the door, the shadow would sway in eerie patterns. In the evenings, before I’d go out and hit the town, I liked to sit beneath the skull and read. As it happens, I was around this time reading Francis Parkman’s
Oregon Trail,
which chronicles the author’s journey to the Great Plains in the summer of 1846. My friend Sandy had given me the book because Parkman does a lot of hunting in it; but because I happened to be thinking about buffalo skulls, I noticed something else entirely: when Parkman, a historian, isn’t complaining about his travel mates, or discoursing on tobacco, or eating a puppy, or complaining about his physical ailments, he is usually describing a Great Plains covered so thick with the skulls of buffalo that it must have been hard to get from place to place. In a meadow full of wildflowers, he sits down on one of the many available buffalo skulls and lazily contemplates the skulls surrounding it. Near the Arkansas River, he sees a white wolf skulking through camp at night and fires a shot at it. When he runs over to what he believes is the wolf’s carcass, it turns out to be nothing more than a large sun-bleached buffalo skull. At another point in his trip, up near the Black Hills of South Dakota, Parkman gets lost. There’s a big thunderstorm headed his way, and he’s terribly afraid of being caught and killed by Pawnee Indians. He writes, “I felt the most dreary forebodings of ill-success . . . the passage was encumbered by the ghastly skulls of buffalo.”

Reading Parkman inspired me to read more about buffalo skulls. I became especially interested in stories about the things that people can learn by digging them up. For instance, a guy named William Fisher in 1932 unearthed a large buffalo skull while digging water lines in downtown Toronto. The skull had settled into sediments predating the Great Lakes, and it was estimated to be somewhere around ten thousand years old. The find was interesting, because the skull did not look like a modern buffalo and it was found in a locality that was not known to have ever had any of the animals.

About twenty years later, on the other end of Canada, a warden named Ulysses La Casse found a buffalo skull along the upper Bow River in Banff National Park. La Casse noticed a steel arrowhead stuck into the skull, with “I. & H. Sorby” stamped into the metal. As it happens, John Sorby (back then, people used
I
s in place of
J
s when registering trademarks) was a toolmaker from Sheffield, England. He and two of his sons, Edwin and John, had long produced “edge tools,” shears, spades, saws, blades, and so forth, under the trademark I.S. In 1827, his third son, Henry, joined the business and they changed the trademark to I. & H. Sorby. Through unknown but no doubt interesting circumstances, one of their tools ended up buried in a buffalo’s head about four thousand miles away.
^*
Before La Casse came along, it was not known that buffalo had lived so far up the Bow River valley. And not only was this proof of their existence there, but it showed that they were present until at least 1827.

Another interesting story came out of Alaska. In 1979, a husband and wife named Walter and Ruth Roman were mining for gold near Fairbanks when they happened to unearth the skull of a type of Ice Age buffalo known as
Bison priscus.
The flesh and skin were still attached to the skull, and so was the animal’s body; it had been frozen in the permafrost and almost perfectly preserved. The animal had been killed in the fall or early winter by an American lion, an extinct cat that was quite similar in appearance to, though larger than, the African lion of today. The lion opened up the buffalo’s hide along the spine and ribs and upper limbs. On the buffalo’s body, pockets of coagulated blood were still visible beneath its wounds. It had died thirty-six thousand years ago. Dale Guthrie, a professor emeritus at the University of Alaska, cooked and ate part of the animal’s neck. He reported it to be “well aged but still a little tough.”

While reading about old buffalo skulls, I encountered a lot of arguments and speculations about the various species and subspecies of buffalo that lived in North America at one time or another. This was initially very confusing to me, and since then I’ve found that it’s confusing to other people as well. First off, it’s important to be clear that there is no difference between the American buffalo and the American bison. The word “buffalo” likely originated in a roundabout way involving the English. In Shakespeare’s time, military men often wore a type of protective jacket known as a buff coat; these coats were thick and soft and made of undyed leather. When Englishmen arrived in the New World, they would often describe any animal that yielded such leather as a “buff,” be it a moose or a manatee. Eventually all of the other North American animals acquired their own particular names, and the largest of them, the American buffalo, walked away with exclusive rights to the title. The name bounced around a bit—buffs, bufle, buffle, buffelo, buffaloe—but it had begun to settle into its modern form by the time of the American Revolution.

The problem with the word “buffalo” is that it had already been given away a couple of times earlier, once to the water buffalo of Asia and once to the Cape buffalo of Africa. Taxonomists, the people in the business of naming and classifying organisms, saw this as a problem, particularly because the American buffalo is not closely related to either of those creatures. As a solution, they began promoting the word “bison,” which had already been used in the Latin name of a closely related European animal, the wisent (
Bison bonasus
). It seems as though these efforts to clarify the situation were in vain: we’ve now got an animal with two perfectly serviceable names, and many discussions about the animal inevitably begin with the question, “What’s the difference between buffalo and bison?”

The scientific system for classifying organisms, whereby an animal gets two names, such as
Bison bison,
is known as binomial nomenclature. Under this system, the first word is the generic name, or genus. The second word is the specific name, or species. Carl Linnaeus, who invented binomial nomenclature, was born in 1707 and believed that all of the world’s species were distinct creatures independently created by the hand of God; more simply put, he didn’t know about evolution. This excusable bit of oversight, considering his time period, makes his system less than ideal for naming fossils.

Bison latifrons
skull recovered in North Dakota.

Here’s why: Over the years, archaeologists and paleontologists (and guys like me) have unearthed many buffalo skulls that look a lot different from the skulls of modern buffalo. For instance, a full-grown modern buffalo has a horn span, from tip to tip, of about three feet. Some ancient buffalo skulls, however, have a horn span of seven feet. And while the modern buffalo’s horns sweep upward and backward, these seven-footers were mostly straight with slight forward-facing curves toward the tips. Other skulls fall in between the two extremes, and each has its own idiosyncratic shape and horn configuration. Logically, taxonomists gave these skulls different names. The really big ones became
Bison latifrons
; other, smaller types of skulls picked up their own names, including
Bison priscus
,
Bison athabascae
,
Bison alleni
,
Bison antiquus
, and
Bison occidentalis
. For much of the twentieth century, the relationships between these different buffalo were not very well understood. Scientists believed that at least some of them coexisted in the present-day United States, where they interbred to produce the modern buffalo. We now know that this is not the case; in fact, the different “species” of “extinct” buffalo were just discrete points along the continuous path of a single species’ trajectory of change.