American Buffalo (22 page)

My wishful thinking about the bears vanishes when I return to the bank of the Chetaslina. There are tracks all over the riverbank, pacing back and forth. I’m just about downwind of the carcass. I’ll bet they were walking the riverbanks when they picked up the odor. Shit. I drop my pack and unload the buffalo’s leg. There aren’t any trees around here that are big enough to tie the leg out of reach of a grizzly. Instead, I hang my sweaty face mask from a tree limb and drape my jacket over the meat. To add a little extra human odor, I drape my sleeping bag over the leg and light a small fire. Then I fill my bottle with water and drop in a crushed iodine tablet before I start to walk back up toward the kill site. You’re supposed to give iodine a half hour or so to work its magic, but I chug the bottle after ten minutes in hopes that I can produce some urine.

When I get back to the buffalo, I strip out of my long underwear and drape the bottoms over the meat. I make a scarecrow with the top. If I were braver, I’d sleep here tonight and make sure nothing messes with the buffalo. But I’m too chickenshit for that. Rather than heading back down with an empty pack, I pull the hide back from the buffalo and carve off the entire loin. It runs from the hip all the way to the base of the neck, like a loaf of French bread as long as a human leg. I have to cut it in half just to fit it in my pack. There’s still a little extra room in my pack, so I remove the tenderloin from inside the cavity and put that in the top of the pack. I pull the hide back over the buffalo and start down toward the Chetaslina.

When I get near the river, I pick up a set of grizzly tracks that are walking on top of the boot prints that I’d just made an hour ago. I get a tingly sensation of fear, a warm upward rush from my stomach. I peer through the underbrush, looking for dark shapes. Nothing. The bear tracks are headed both ways, as if it walked toward the carcass and then turned around. After a few more minutes of walking, I find the place where one of the bears entered and exited the trail. I don’t see any tracks from the other bear.

The leg is untouched, and there aren’t any tracks in the snow next to it. The bears were apparently afraid to approach, but still, I don’t relish the idea of sleeping here tonight. Besides, I’m missing a layer of clothes. I’d probably freeze my ass off. I stand for a moment, staring at the river and trying to decide what to do. I’ve got the buffalo’s highest-quality cuts of meat in my pack, the loin and tenderloin, and I figure that I might as well haul them back to the Copper and spend the night in my tent. It’s three miles away and on the other side of the river. If I hurry, I’ll get there before dark.

                  13                  

I
DREAMED ABOUT BEARS LAST NIGHT
. They looked at me, spoke to me, turned into people that I’ve known. I have dreams like that often, dreams in which the animal and human worlds morph together in bizarre ways; I believe the dreams are the result of being a hunter, because the animals that appear to me are creatures that I’ve stalked and eaten in real life. The dreams started in my teens, back when I used to trap hundreds of muskrats every year to sell their pelts. Muskrats live in swamps, lakes, and rivers, and one of the most reliable ways to catch them is to set foothold traps on their floating feed beds, which are dinner-plate-sized mats of food and vegetation that the muskrats collect and store for later use. You run four feet of bailing wire from the trap chain and anchor it beneath the water’s surface. In the morning, if the trap’s gone, you know that a muskrat got caught and pulled the trap into the water and drowned. I’d reach down into the water up to my shoulder and feel around for the wire and then follow that wire with my hand until I felt the fur. In my dreams, though, I’d find the hair of a human.

Bears are the worst animal to dream about, because they some-times act like people even outside of my dreams. They rise to their hind feet with such fluidity and ease that it’s startling to watch. I can’t help but think of human behaviors that correspond to their activities. I remember one time in early May when I was hunting black bears at the base of an avalanche slide in the Bitterroot Mountains of western Montana. A female bear and her two cubs were grazing on vegetation that was springing out of ground tilled by avalanches. I was watching the bear through my rifle scope when she caught my odor. She stood up and looked right at me, reminding me of the way you might stand to greet someone who just walked into the room. I felt rude for having a rifle trained on her chest.

The Chetaslina is running like a frozen daiquiri. I listen from my tent as the slushy water makes a tingling noise against the rocks. My back is a little sore from bending over and butchering all day yesterday. I do some stretches while lying in my sleeping bag and then unzip the tent door and crawl outside into the cold to make a fire. I stand in the smoke until my boots are thawed enough to get my feet inside. When I cross the river in my dry suit and step onto the other bank, the drips of water running down my legs freeze into little beads of ice. I pull off the suit as quickly as possible and put the liners and boots back on before they freeze solid again. I start the walk up toward the carcass. Being on my feet and getting warmed up makes my back feel better.

Speaking of bears, the two grizzlies must have continued to hang around the area during the night. I cut the first set of tracks when I’m still a quarter mile away from where I left the buffalo’s front leg. I can see where one of the bears came downriver toward my camp along the Copper and then turned around and walked back. It’s unnerving, the way these bears will pace back and forth, testing and exploring. It reminds me of a burglar casing out a job. I continue along, taking it slow and easy, walking in the same path that the bear took. I’ve got my rifle down off my shoulder with the butt plate tucked up against my hip. My binoculars are in my other hand; I’m using them to study the brush up ahead of me for dark shapes or movement. I know I left the meat on the edge of the river, on this side, but I don’t have an exact fix on the location. If a grizzly took the leg, he’d probably drag it off somewhere. That somewhere might be here.

Once I can see the face mask that I left hanging from the tree limb, I stop to listen. I can hear the croak of ravens off toward the carcass. They make a noise that sounds like ripping an empty beer can in half. I move closer and see that the leg is undisturbed. Surprisingly, the ground all around the leg is plastered with grizzly tracks. Some of the prints would have put the bear into easy reach of the meat—the closest prints are just thirty inches away. I can’t believe that it would have come that close and then lost its nerve. Unless I happened to just come along and scare it off.

I take a piss next to the leg and start up my path leading toward the kill site. There are a couple of fresh sets of grizzly tracks over my boots, but after a few minutes of walking there’s nothing but my own prints. Bright little splotches of red and blue in the snow mark where I stepped on remnant crowberries and blueberries left over from the summer. Soon I can see the general area of the carcass and the blood-streaked path that it cut in the snow. I’d be smart to move upwind and let my smell blow down through the area, but I want to get a good look at whatever’s happening. I move in a half circle downwind until I’m on the hillside above the carcass and looking down into the tangle of aspens where it crashed. I don’t see anything except birds, and I haven’t hit any new grizzly tracks. The gray jays lift off the gut pile as I approach. I lean my rifle against the rib cage and unload my gear.

When I initially drew this tag, the world up here along the Copper River seemed so huge and unknowable. All of my questions were questions of space: Where can I go? How can I get there? Now the world is shrunk down to this small patch of snow and ground, hide and flesh. I like the way it feels here; my own little hangout. After collecting some wood, I get a fire going down in the spruce trees below the buffalo. My goal is to give the bears one more reason to stay away, but it also amplifies the homey feel of the kill site. Looking up the hill, I think again about the blood streaks from where the buffalo slid down the hillside. Low-flying aircraft would see that for sure, and they’d see the smoke from the fire. I’m on public land, totally legal, but someone might wonder how I got up here. They might wonder if I was trespassing or if I actually came up the river channel the way I’m supposed to. If they were curious enough, they could buzz circles overhead and look for my boot prints. I can’t tell if I’m being paranoid or not. Thinking about bears is making me jumpy.

The hide is partially frozen, and it crinkles as I pull it back away from the meat. The body is starting to freeze up, too. If the massive neck and head freeze solid, it will be really difficult to remove the skull and clean it of flesh. I’d have to haul the whole thing out of here in one big, meaty piece. Grabbing the buffalo by the horns, I can twist its head into slightly different positions. The buffalo’s body is stiff enough that it stays in whatever position I put it, like one of those wire-bodied Gumby dolls. With the head tipped to the side, I make two long slits with my knife, each starting where you touch your throat to see if your lymph nodes are swollen. I extend each of those cuts along the inside edges of the jawbone until they meet at the point of the chin. Then I pull back the triangle-shaped flap of hide, slicing it as it comes, until I can access and sever the base of the tongue. It spills out like a giant two-and-a-half-pound slug backing away from a wet, toothy sac. To eat it, you just boil it until the outside coating starts to peel away.

The simple, perfect ease of extracting the tongue is satisfying. I think of a day when I passed through Fort Pierre, South Dakota, in order to look at an area along the Missouri River where several hundred Sioux hunters slaughtered fourteen hundred buffalo and cut out the tongues. This was in the summer of 1830. They did the killing and cutting in the morning and then hauled the tongues into a trading post and swapped them for liquor. The remaining 1.5 million pounds of untouched buffalo parts were left on the prairie to rot. Since then, historians have used that anecdote for many purposes that have suited their own needs of the moment: to demonstrate the evils of alcohol; to prove the corrupting nature of capitalism; to argue that Indians were not parsimonious conservationists; and to show that Indians were practical about getting what they needed from the buffalo.

I think about this last point often as I butcher the buffalo. Every schoolboy knows that the Indians used every part of the buffalo, which is true. But they did not use every part of every buffalo. Their relationship with buffalo reminds me of my own relationship with the one- and two-liter bottles of tonic water that I buy for making vokda tonics. Now and then, I’ll have occasion to cut the top off one of these bottles and use it as a funnel for putting salad dressing ingredients into a bottle. I’ll also cut off the bottoms of tonic bottles and use them as containers for soaking rusted mechanical parts in solvent or freezing fish fillets. Perforated, they make good bait canisters for crab trapping. Sometimes I’ll ice my catch of fish with tonic bottles that were filled with water and placed in the freezer overnight. It keeps the water inside clean, so after the ice melts, you can still drink the water. Once you drink the water, you can put the lid back on and tie monofilament around the neck of the bottle and use it as a buoy to mark the place where you caught the fish.

So, as you see, one could argue that I use every last part of my tonic bottles. The truth is, though, I only need so many funnels and bait cans. Nine times out of ten, I’ll just drink the tonic and toss the bottle into the recycling bin. In the same way, Indians only needed so many implements and decorations. If a tribe drove three hundred buffalo over a cliff, they wouldn’t feel obligated to make twenty-four hundred buffalo-hoof spoons and six hundred buffalo-horn charcoal carriers. Rather, they might just take the meat and hides from the best-looking female buffalo, those that weren’t too smashed up or buried under other buffalo. That might be all they touched. After all, their time and energy had value, just as ours does.

The Indians’ relationship to the buffalo was complex and beautiful, not because of the Indians’ unwavering frugality with the buffalo but because of their unwavering inventiveness with the animal. Describing this inventiveness tests the limits of my tonic bottle analogy. While I might use tonic bottles for many purposes, I do not know how to cut tonic bottles with knives made from tonic bottles; I’m not wearing a tonic bottle right now, and I’m not living inside a tonic bottle house.

Indians would use untanned skins, or rawhide, to make buckets, mortars, war shields, drums, splints, cinches, lariats, packing straps, knife sheaves, saddles, blankets, stirrups, masks, ornaments, quirts, snowshoes, boats, and moccasin soles. They’d use tanned buffalo hides to make moccasin uppers, blankets, beds, winter coats, shirts, leggings, dresses, belts, bridles, quivers, backrests, bags, tapestries, sweat lodge covers, tipi covers, and tipi liners. The skin from the hind leg could be taken directly off the buffalo and used as emergency footwear. Indians would make baby cradles with tanned buffalo hides, and they’d make buffalo-skin sacks for carrying their babies on trips. If an infant was orphaned, it might be wrapped in a buffalo robe and left in the arms of its dead mother on a burial scaffold lashed together with strips of buffalo hide.

Indians would use buffalo hair, particularly the hair on the buffalo’s forehead, to stuff pillows, dolls, sleeping pads, and medicine balls.
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They’d insulate their moccasins with buffalo hair. They’d braid buffalo hair into ropes and use the ropes to make headdresses, bracelets, hairpieces, bridles, and halters. The Comanche wove lariats from such coarse buffalo hair that the ropes appeared to be growing hair, like a caterpillar. Left together, the tailbone and its covering of hair were used as fly swatters, whips, decorations, and children’s toys. The Indians would remove the buffalo’s beard and use it as a decoration.

The shoulder blades of the buffalo were crafted into boat paddles and gardening implements, such as shovels and hoes. Other bones made good fleshing tools, smoking pipes, arrowheads, sled runners, saddle frames, war clubs, scrapers, awls, paintbrushes, sewing needles, gaming dice, knives and knife handles, and forks and spoons. The horns were used as ladles, head ornaments, bow laminates, powder horns, arrowheads, and decorative flourishes on headwear.

Buffalo teeth were used as ornaments for clothing. Brains and livers were used to treat leather. Indians would wash out a buffalo’s stomach and use it as a kettle, a washing basin, a water bucket, or as packaging material for meat. When dried out, buffalo tongues become prickly; Indians used these tongues as hair combs. They’d dry the scrotums out and use them as rattles. The rattle’s handle might be a buffalo bone. Bladders were made into balloons, flotation devices, and waterproof pouches. They’d also use bladders to store buffalo marrow or buffalo fat. The fat would be used as a pomade-like hair treatment, as a base for medicine or cosmetics, and as a cooking oil, a food item, and a waterproofing agent. Indians would cook the hooves and noses down into glue. They’d use tendons and sinews from the buffalo to make bowstrings and cords. The best and most durable sinews came from alongside the spine. These could be split into fine, strong threads for sewing clothes. The thread was also used to lash points and feathers to arrows that could be used to kill more buffalo.