American Buffalo (7 page)

Rafferty and Jessen volunteer to fetch the raft and unload it while Danny and I walk down the Copper to have a look around. Here and there we can steal views of the grassy bluffs to the north and east of us. We study the bluffs with binoculars, looking for buffalo trails or, better yet, the animals themselves. I cut a fresh set of wolf tracks just down from our campsite. The prints look like those of a supersized dog trotting along in a straight line. They’re fresh, maybe from this morning. The tracks cross a few shallow channels of water and disappear in narrow patches of brush, always emerging on the other side in the same steady gait.

Wolf tracks along the Copper River.

I abandon the tracks to inspect a shallow stream flowing out of the timber at the base of a hillside. The water in the stream isn’t gray like the water in the Copper; instead, it’s clear, with just a slight brownish tint from tannins leached out of tree roots. Where the clear water hits the Copper, it forms a trailing, bedroom-sized pool of clear water that is infiltrated on the edges by wisps and swirls of gray glacial water. Salmon pass lazily through the clear water, moving sideways to the current and disappearing into the gray. I follow the creek upstream from its mouth and into the alders. The mud is plastered with bear tracks, mostly grizzly, though there’s one set of black bear.
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Just inside the alders the creek is blocked by a beaver dam, with a deep pool of water below the dam from where the beavers have excavated mud by scooping it up in clumps and clasping the clumps between their chests and forearms while rushing forward with their back feet. The pool swarms with half-dead coho salmon, drawn to the promise of a spawning stream. But this promise was probably a lie, and the fish have been waiting at this impassable barrier for who knows how long. Some of the salmon cut frantic circles in the pool, while others loll in a half-dead stupor. For salmon, a trip upriver to spawn is invariably fatal; but for these fish, the trip upriver is looking to be fatal and futile. They have accumulated many wounds and skin abrasions from their journey, and their wounds are infected with saprolegnia, a parasitic fungus that attacks damaged tissues in freshwater and causes a mycosis that looks like cottony gauze. One salmon is missing a section of its back. It looks like a wedge of melon with a bite missing. There’s no telling how it happened: a raptor, a seal, a sea lion, a bear, the moving parts of a fish trap. The fungus on the wound wisps about in the gentle current like a sea fan. The banks are strewn with the naked spines of his fellows, dragged ashore by bears and stripped clean of meat. Their eggs are scattered about, as if some kid spilled little orange marbles in the dirt.

Throughout the day the air has slowly warmed up, and now it’s edging above freezing. It starts to rain. I pull my rain jacket out of my pack, and Danny and I climb up a big pile of drift logs to get a look around. We’ve got a good view of several grassy bluffs rising out of the forest a couple miles to the east and north. All of it is Ahtna land. I watch the slopes with my binoculars while Danny adjusts the tripod beneath a spotting scope. The slopes are distant and foggy, but I could see a big animal if it was there.

Danny pulls his hood out far enough to act as a rain shield for the optical lens of the scope as he fiddles with the focus knob. “When you get that thing set up,” I say, “check out the bluff that’s farthest to the left. Up at the crest. There’s some dark shapes up there. Probably nothing, but check them out.”

Seconds later, Danny says the word that I’ve been wanting to hear for a very long time. “Buffalo,” he says. “Those gotta be buffalo.”

“Are they moving?”

“No, it looks like they’re bedded down. It looks like four, maybe. One’s a lot smaller than the others. Maybe a calf. You see that tan-colored line cutting across the hill below the shapes? Like a game trail? It’s for sure a game trail.”

“You sure?” I say. “They look like rocks.”

Just then, I watch one of the shapes shift a bit. Then the shape next to it shifts as well. The third shape rises up to a standing position. At that distance its legs are invisible, so it looks like it’s floating above the ground. The others stand up. Two buffalo, three buffalo, four. For the first time in my life, I’m a buffalo hunter looking at a group of buffalo, and for a beautiful moment or two I’m paralyzed by the joy of it. In the final moments of daylight, I find myself running a simple word through my head again and again. Buffalo . . . buffalo . . . buffalo . . . It’s as though something from the prison of the past has stepped into the sunlight of the present.

                  6                  

M
Y SECOND DAY
on the Copper River breaks cold and gray, with clouds thick like barroom smoke laid low over the land. I pull on my boots and step outside of the tent to take a leak. I can’t see the hills because of the clouds. The horizon is just beyond camp; I could throw a rock to it. It rained on and off through the night, and the tracks in the mud became dappled by the raindrops and then froze solid. Now I can walk across my old boot prints without leaving any new ones. In a couple hours the ground will probably be soft again. This kind of weather is the norm rather than the exception; climatologists describe this region as one of the most variable solar environments in the world. Sun, clouds, sun, clouds, sun, clouds. When you average out all the daily temperatures recorded here throughout the year, you get a figure that’s below freezing.

I grab my rifle and explore the horizon, enjoying the way it moves out ahead of me in a slow revelation of the land. A hundred yards out from camp I see where a grizzly bear passed through before the surface of the ground froze. I follow its tracks long enough to see that it stopped to dig a salmon carcass out of the mud. The bear rolled the fish around and flipped it into a pool of water, then left it lying there. The fish’s eyeballs are missing, and its tail fin is gray with fungus. In the low light, the water in the river looks as viscous as half-and-half. If you pump the Copper’s water through a handheld filtration system, the particulate matter will clog the filter and destroy it. If you don’t filter it, you can feel the crunch of it between your teeth. We filled a collapsible bucket with river water last night to make drinking water, and the silt settled to the bottom as a light layer. The top is capped by ice.

Confluence of Dadina and Copper rivers.

We can’t do much of anything until the clouds lift, so we look at a topographical map to double-check the location of last night’s buffalo. The animals were quite clearly on Ahtna land, and I’d have to hire one of O. J. Simpson’s lawyers if I wanted to make the case that they were within the high-water mark. Still, I’m curious enough to hang around in order to get a second look at their whereabouts. Large animals are remarkable both in their propensity to move and in their propensity to stay put. I’ve gone to sleep in the vicinity of two hundred head of elk, fixing to stalk one of them in the morning with my bow, only to have the sun rise and find that they’ve traveled so far that it takes me two days to find them again. At other times I’ve watched elk sleep and feed on the same little knife-edge ridge for a week without moving. While I wait for the clouds to lift, I roll up my extra clothes and stuff them into a rubberized bag with a roll-top watertight seal. The four of us shake the dew from our eight-man tent and brush the bottom free from river gravel and then pack it into its sack. The cookware gets cleaned and goes into its own bag. I stack all of the food into an improvised and probably ineffective bear-resistant container that we jury-rigged from a heavy-duty sealed plastic box wrapped in nylon compression straps. I check the inside of my waterproof rifle case, more like a giant sock, for condensation. It’s dry. I check the lenses of the rifle’s scope. Dry and clear. I wipe the rifle’s metal parts with a lightly oiled rag and slip it into the case. The rag goes into a Ziploc; the Ziploc bag goes into my shirt pocket.

By the time everything’s loaded into the raft and tied down, the clouds have lifted enough for us to see that the buffalo are in fact gone. I’m almost glad; my decision about whether or not to trespass has been made for me. We shove away from the bank, and the river carries us away as if we were a balloon taken by the wind. Drifting along, I can’t stop thinking of the trespassing issue. I’ve thought about my reluctance to trespass, and I believe that it has to do with the fact that it’s owned by a Native Alaskan corporation; as a white person of European descent, I feel as though I don’t really have any business screwing around on their land.

I think of the Treaties of Medicine Lodge, struck in October 1867 between the U.S. government and five thousand Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, and Arapaho from the southern Great Plains. The tribes wanted to protect their buffalo hunting grounds to the south of the Arkansas River from Euro-American encroachment; the United States wanted to protect settlers to the north of the river, and also railroad workers who were laying tracks in the Arkansas valley. In settling the agreement, the United States formulated a clause that only a lawyer could love, giving the Indians exclusive hunting rights south of the Arkansas River “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase.” Immediately following ratification, the military turned a blind eye while Euro-American hide hunters went in there and killed most of the buffalo. The subsequent lack of food forced Indians to seek provisions from the government, which—you guessed it—suggested that buffalo no longer ranged thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase. That effectively undid the treaty and opened the door for more hide hunters to go down there with military protection and kill whatever buffalo were left.

However, another part of me views the issue within the context of a much deeper history, which is the long saga of humankind’s involvement with buffalo—a saga that predates racial collisions. If that history shows one thing, it’s that humans have seldom regarded the wishes of other humans when it comes to following and killing buffalo, and this has caused many thousands of years of warfare and violence. One could blame human behavior for the trouble, but it’s probably just as useful to blame buffalo. Left to their own devices, the animals just refuse to locate themselves in convenient places at convenient times. Many historians have argued that buffalo followed very “predictable” and “regular” migration patterns and that early human cultures in North America exploited those patterns to get what they needed from the animals while avoiding conflict with one another. This understanding is one of the many pleasant and naive fallacies that we entertain with regard to the balancing act performed between buffalo and humans. It holds that buffalo occurred across the landscape in a fairly constant distribution, with each buffalo more or less belonging to a specific “herd.” These herds had names, usually based on where they spent the winter. There was the Republican herd of the Republican River, the Yellowstone herd of the Yellowstone River, and so on. To explain the constant movement of buffalo from place to place, people thought that each herd was perpetually migrating in response to the ebb and flow of the seasons.
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Northward for the summer, southward for the winter. For example, buffalo that wintered in New Mexico would summer in Colorado. Buffalo that wintered in Colorado would summer in Montana. Buffalo that wintered in Montana would summer in southern Canada. Buffalo that wintered in southern Canada would summer in central Canada. When I think of this theory, I imagine the land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains as the lid of a shoe box. The shoe box is almost filled by a single layer of marbles, each representing a buffalo herd. The edge of the box close to your body is the south, the distant edge the north. Tip the box slightly downward and away from you for spring movements; slightly upward and toward you for fall movements. When you do this, each marble maintains a constant position relative to its neighbor while still moving back and forth.

The north-south migration theory, which advocates strictly latitudinal movements, is like a small-scale version of the annual movements of migratory birds, such as ducks and geese, which are capable of traveling hundreds of miles in twenty-four-hour periods and which can move from the Arctic to South America in a matter of weeks or months. Being bound to the land, buffalo obviously move much more slowly; they aren’t really capable of making the concerted, long-distance treks necessary to make such a system worthwhile. Rather, buffalo migrated in a much more localized sense: older, more experienced animals led younger animals across a vast though largely familiar landscape. They
tended
to respond to seasonal weather patterns by moving from higher elevations to lower elevations in the fall, and vice versa in the spring; they tended to seek out open country in good weather and sheltered country in bad; when food was scarce, they tended to split apart into small roving bands; when food was abundant, they tended to come together in large herds; if they felt safe and were well fed, they tended to stay put; if they were hungry or threatened, they tended to move. If such movements dictated that they were going north in the winter, or south in the summer, so be it.
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Perhaps the buffalo’s movement patterns are best described by the Canadian historian Frank Gilbert Roe. The buffalo’s movements, he writes, “were utterly erratic and unpredictable and might occur regardless of time, place, or season, with any number, in any direction, in any manner, under any conditions, and for any reason—which is to say, for no ‘reason’ at all.”

Because the buffalo has no concept of boundaries or private land, Native American buffalo hunters have historically forsaken those concepts as well. Or, as was more often the case, the hunters have tried to have it both ways: when buffalo were on their land, they defended their land against human trespassers; when buffalo were not on their land, they trespassed onto the lands of others. These disputes over buffalo hunting grounds likely dated back to the arrival of humans in the New World, but for most of human history the wars were probably low-intensity affairs that claimed few lives and required only small amounts of energy and resources.

All of that changed when Cortés introduced the horse to the Americas. From then on, buffalo-related warfare became the defining aspect of intertribal politics. The transition was sudden and dramatic. The horse arrived in Mexico in 1519, and within thirty years there were thousands of horses in Mexico. By 1700 the Pueblo Indians had acquired the horse through warfare and theft, and they quickly became master horsemen and breeders. The Pueblos made no attempt to keep a lock on their newfound treasure. They established a thriving business in the horse trade and helped spread the animal throughout the United States as rapidly as the buffalo would later disappear. The Navajo got horses from the Pueblos and traded them up the western edge of the Rockies. The Comanche traded them up the eastern edge of the Rockies, along the Great Plains. The Nez Percé and Shoshones, way up around Idaho, had them by the 1730s. The Crows bought horses from the Nez Percé, and the Blackfeet stole them from the Crows. When the Crows had excess horses, they herded them toward the Missouri and sold them to tribes there. The Sioux, in the vicinity of the upper Mississippi, on the extreme northeast fringe of the Great Plains, had the horse by 1750. Their animals had come from tribes to both the south and the west. By that time, there were perhaps more than a million wild horses in the western United States that had no owners whatsoever.

Pre-horse hunters usually only ventured out on large-scale buffalo hunts during the summer breeding seasons, when the herds congregated in terrific numbers along major rivers. In the fall, when the herds broke up and traveled in erratic directions, the Indians returned to their permanent villages to fish catfish and harvest crops of corn, beans, and squash. But the horse made it possible to give up farming and have no permanent home, because, in essence, the horse was your home: with a travois, the horse could pull all of one’s possessions, including family-sized tents that could withstand winter.