American Buffalo (18 page)

What locals refer to as “Boneville,” along Rouge River, Detroit, Michigan, late 1800s.

The Detroit Public Library houses a famous photo from around the time of the bone crisis. It shows a mountain of stacked buffalo skulls that’s thirty feet high at the crest and hundreds of feet long. The photo was taken in a rail yard at the Michigan Carbon Works in Detroit, a place that locals called “Boneville.” I’ve driven past there several times—crossing the Rouge River on the I-75 bridge, you can look down and see the exact place. It would require an involved feat of extrapolation to calculate just how many thousands of skulls were in that heap. The most interesting thing about the photo is the man standing at the top. Wearing a suit and top hat, a large buffalo skull propped against his leg, he resembles an exclamation point standing at the top of a very long sentence about death and destruction.

Since the end of the buffalo bone days, the Michigan Carbon Works has downsized dramatically. The agricultural industry turned away from bones and began using pulverized phosphate rock as a source for phosphorous fertilizer. Many old markets for bone carbon are now satisfied by carbon black, a by-product of fossil fuel combustion that is otherwise known as soot. Today, what’s left of the Michigan Carbon Works is a small company called Ebonex, located on South Wabash Street in Melvindale, Michigan. They burn cattle bones to create ash that is used as dye in colored plastics, coated paper, wood stains, and paints. The Food and Drug Administration has given bone ash GRAS status, or generally regarded as safe. It’s used to treat water on fish farms, and it’s used in water filters for household aquariums. They also sell a lot of bone ash to movie production companies that want to replicate oil spills. Mixed with vegetable oil, bone ash makes a biodegradable dead ringer for Texas tea. If you’ve seen
The Beverly Hillbillies, Die Hard 3, Men in Black, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
or
Jarhead,
you’ve seen the contemporary products of a company that once produced about 650 tons of buffalo bone ash every year.

                  11                  

W
HATEVER BUFFALO FEVER IS
, it doesn’t last long. When I wake up just before daylight, I feel perfectly fine. I kick my legs inside my sleeping bag for a minute. Still fine, no nausea. I’m using a plastic Popov vodka bottle as a water bottle, and the contents are frozen almost completely solid. The temperature must have dropped in the night. The expanding ice has forced the bottle into a bulbous, gourd-like shape. There’s a pocket of open water in the center of the ice, so I reach through the neck of the bottle with the blade of my Leatherman and auger a hole toward it. Everything outside the tent is crusted in a thin hard layer of frost. The cooking pot is so cold that my fingertips stick to it. I go over to the river, kick away some ice, and dip the pot into the water. My fingertips are immediately released. The river’s flowing with slush. The thawing of the glacier at the head of the Chetaslina River must have slowed considerably because the water level has dropped nearly a foot. I scrub the pot with fine gravel and then fill it with water.

Rather than messing with the buffalo chips or looking for wood, I try to get my gas-powered stove lit. When I remove the fuel tank, my thumb sticks to the metal. I blow some warm air on there to get my thumb back, and then I open the filler cap on the tank. I don’t have a funnel with me, so I use a short stick to guide the gas from the fuel can into the small port on the tank. I tighten the filler cap, slide the tank into place, and then turn the pump plunger a half crank counterclockwise. After a dozen pumps the tank is pressurized. When I open the valve wheel on the generator, the stove lets off a sound like a can of shook-up beer getting opened. After four flicks of my lighter the stove hasn’t lit and the tank quits hissing. The stove’s too cold.

“Son of a bitch,” I say.

I close the valve wheel and pump the plunger a couple more times. Then I pour a dab of gas on the master burner and light it. The metal clinks and clacks as it heats up. With the flame burned out and the metal good and hot, I dip a twig into the fuel can and then light it with the lighter. A turn of the valve wheel and a touch of the twig to the hot burner bring the stove to life. I wave my fingers over the flame until the feeling returns.

I want to get going early, so instead of a regular breakfast I eat a couple of mini-sized candy bars and some half-frozen pasta chased down with a cup of coffee. When I’m done, I rinse the cup in the river and pack it into a nylon sack with a couple days’ worth of food and some other odds and ends that I’ll need. The tent’s on top of a small tarp to help keep the floor’s fabric dry; I yank the tarp out from under the tent like a magician pulling a tablecloth from under plates and glasses. There’s a layer of glacial flour frozen to the tarp like sandpaper, so I shake it out and brush it off before rolling it up and fastening it to the outside of my pack. I stuff my sleeping bag into its sack and stuff that into the bottom of my pack.

My dry suit is frozen like a rock, and I can’t even get my legs into the openings. I turn the stove back on and stand over it, exposing a little bit of the material at a time until the suit is limber enough to climb into. I don’t want my boot liners getting all wet, so I pull them out of the boots and tuck them under the lid of the pack. I put the boots on over the feet of the dry suit and tie them up enough to prevent me from tripping on the laces. I strap my rifle to my pack with a bungee cord and then find a good walking stick to help me across the Chetaslina River. I step into the water, taking it slow, and I ease across by using the stick as a point of resistance against the current. Once I’m on the other bank, I take off the suit and shake out the boots as best as I can. The boots start to freeze almost instantly, and I have to walk around for a couple of minutes before they’re loose enough to lace them up. I stick a smooth rock into each leg of the dry suit so it doesn’t blow away while I’m gone, and then I hang it over a patch of willow. My toes are so cold they ache.

I barely go two hundred yards and a wolf’s standing in front me. He’s so close that I could spit a cherry pit and hit him if I wanted to. He doesn’t see me, but he knows something’s not right. I hold dead still. The wolf swipes his nose through the air as fast as a waving hand. He looks through me before looking at me, like I’m just another clump of willow standing here. He licks his upper lip, in a quick flash of the tongue that goes from his left to his right. Then his eyes pass over me again and he seems to see what I am, or maybe what I am not, and his body shrinks down into the ground as though suddenly supporting a great weight from above. When the wolf springs into a run, headed upstream, his head and front shoulders are scrunched low to the ground as if he’s preparing to duck under a fence. I jog ahead to catch another glimpse, but there’s nothing to see but willows and rocks.

My plan is to follow the Chetaslina upstream until I get clear of the Ahtna land and then make my way up to the crest of the ridge where I’d seen the four bulls a couple days before. In my mind, I’ve come to think of the ridge as “Buffalo Ridge.” I’m going to start sleeping up there so I won’t have to waste daylight hours hauling myself back and forth to my main camp.

As I work my way upstream, I notice some wet splashes on the rocks ahead of me. Something came out of the river dripping wet. I follow the splashes across the river rocks and come to a fresh set of buffalo tracks stamped into the frozen crust of ground. The tracks are huge, the biggest set I’ve seen by far. Buffalo hunters used to swap tales about giant buffalo that were one and a half times taller than regular buffalo. They called them buffalo oxen. In livestock terminology, oxen are adult castrated bulls used as draft animals. They’re thinner in the neck and get taller than bulls that are allowed to keep their nuts, so when hunters saw particularly big buffalo on the Great Plains, they assumed that the same processes were at play except that it was wolves doing the castrating. Maybe the wolf that I just saw was licking his lips over the thought of getting himself a set of buffalo balls for lunch.

The sudden appearance of the tracks kind of depresses me. I’m not feeling very good about my prospects of finding a buffalo, and for some reason this encounter with the tracks makes me feel even worse. The tracks seem so purely random in their occurrence—just a single animal cutting through hundreds of square miles of wilderness with no apparent aim. The tracks aren’t in any of the places where I’ve been concentrating my energies: they aren’t on a trail; they aren’t in a meadow; they aren’t on a ridge. This might be the closest I’ve gotten to a buffalo, and the only reason I know it was here is because of a few droplets of water on some rocks. Indians used to find buffalo in lots of ways beyond actually seeing the animals. On the Great Plains, clouds of stirred-up dirt often gave buffalo herds away. The animals would kick up the dirt while they ran or wallowed, creating what one explorer described as “vast clouds of dust rising and circling in the air as though a tornado or whirlwind were sweeping over the earth.” In hot weather, people could see clouds of water vapor coming off large herds that were hidden from view behind hills. When it was cold, a cloud of frost sometimes hung over large herds. The nature of the frost could tell a skilled hunter how large the group was and how compactly they were herded together. Birds gave buffalo away, too. Some birds followed the herds in order to pick grass seeds out of their fresh droppings or to hunt for insects kicked up by the buffalo’s feet. One of these species of birds used to be called a buffalo bird, but now it’s known as a cowbird. A small flock of these birds flying over the distant prairie could tell a hunter that it might be worthwhile to walk over there and see what was up.

I try to follow the buffalo, but I lose its trail. In the trees, the crust of frost on the ground is not thick enough to show animal tracks. Sometimes, I’ll lose an animal’s trail and then find it again by looking for likely routes. Then I’ll jump ahead to see if I can find fresh tracks that validate my guess. I try this a few times but don’t find anything. Instead, I continue along, staying on the west bank of the Chetaslina. I follow the river’s course through alder snags and across gravel bars. Sometimes the river cuts so close to the spruce forest that I’m forced into the woods to bushwhack. I start crossing intermittent sets of buffalo tracks on the softer ground. Some are old and some are fresh, and I can see places where the animals have been milling around and feeding on patches of willow. I move very slowly, scanning the land in front of me and taking only a few steps at a time. I’m a little over four miles upstream from my campsite at the confluence of the Copper and the Chetaslina. Here, the east fork of the Chetaslina flows into the river’s main channel. The rivers collide at an angle similar to how your fingers come together when you make a peace sign with your hand. The land between the two branches is filled by a ridge that collapses sharply into the valley floor. Like every ridge around here, it’s capped by a worn buffalo trail. I should go over and check that for fresh sign, I think. I take a few steps that way and then come into a small opening amid the spruce trees, and I get hit by a breeze that’s carrying the smell of buffalo. It’s a lot like the smell of horses—not the smell of horses standing in a stable amid their own filth, but that of horses out in the open, on green pasture. I slowly drop down to my haunches, then inch my way over to a spruce tree so that my profile is broken up. I start looking ahead through the brush and trees with my binoculars. I don’t see anything yet. I’ve often found elk like this, just by smelling them. I can usually tell the difference between the smell of elk that are there and the smell of elk that
used
to be there. This odor I smell now has a strange touch of warmth to it, like they either are here or have just left.

I slip my rifle down from my shoulder and lay it quietly across my knee. I’m breathing slowly as I concentrate on the smells and the sounds of the woods. I move ahead a little more, picking my path very carefully to not make noise. I hear nothing but a distant chickadee and the gurgle of flowing water. The frozen ground is quiet against the knees of my wool pants. I move a little more and then stop. Away from the river, the forest is an impenetrable tangle of young spruce. The odor of the animals is no longer on the breeze. Just as I’m hoping that the buffalo didn’t head into the tangle, I hear it. A snapping twig. Then I hear another. I raise my rifle and glance through the scope, but I can’t find anything. I stand and take a few quick steps forward, and sure enough there’s a well-worn trail. I slide the rifle’s safety lever forward and place my finger through the trigger guard. The trigger finds its place inside the first joint of my finger. I take a few slow steps down the trail, my rifle raised, but the sound of snapping brush is moving away from me at too fast a clip. I don’t want to bust through the brush and take a running-away shot at a buffalo’s ass, especially if I can’t tell whether I’m looking at a cow or bull or calf or what. I back up and move downwind of the animals until I’m a couple hundred feet away from their trail. Then I start moving parallel to their route, picking my way through thickets of spruce and head-high alder. It’s slow going, but the last thing I want is to spook a herd of buffalo out of the area.

If it was in fact a group of buffalo that I heard, I have no way of knowing how fast they are moving. My only real hope is that I’ll pass ahead of them in the valley floor and then be ready and waiting in case they move into the open meadows along the valley’s western wall. It takes me about forty minutes to get to the edge of the valley’s floor. I move slowly uphill on a very long and steep incline. I stop every few steps to look back behind me, down into the timber, to see if I can glimpse any movements. I watch for dark patches of fur, and I watch for shaking brush and moving treetops that might give a buffalo away. My field of view expands as I climb higher and higher, until I’m at the crest of the ridge and I can see down into many of the small meadows and willow patches that are scattered around the valley floor. I can see meadows along the hillside to my left and right. Scanning the surrounding country, I know that I’m
looking
at buffalo. I just can’t
see
them.