American Buffalo (24 page)

I click on my headlamp, and the illumination is stopped short by the misty haze and thick timber. I continue along, following my tracks from earlier. The going is rough, with lots of downed timber. A bear would have to make a lot of noise coming through here. I stop to listen, and again I hear footsteps. This time they’re coming from the other side of the trail. Just a few at first, and then the noise explodes in a flurry of footsteps and crashing brush. I crouch down next to a tree trunk, fearing that something’s coming my way. But the footfalls get farther and farther away and then make a sudden stop. The air is still and noiseless. I replay the noise in my mind. It didn’t sound like hooves. It sounded like padded feet.

When I’m scared in the woods, I tend to think of other times when I’ve been freaked out. It’s soothing for some reason. When I was a little kid, my family bow hunted for deer on a large tract of farmland owned by a man named Allen Zerlaut. We hunted out of trees, because deer are less likely to detect your presence when you’re above them. You have to be twelve to legally hunt deer in Michigan, so for many years my brothers and I sat up in my dad’s tree with him. He stole street signs and made platforms out of them that could be bound to tree limbs with chain binders, and we must have looked like a mother raccoon and her pups spread out in the limbs of those big beech and maple trees. When my brother Matt turned twelve, Danny sat in his tree with him to keep him from being afraid. When Danny turned twelve, Matt was all alone and I sat with Danny. Two years later and I became a legal hunter, too, so from then on we all had to be out in the woods by ourselves.

In discussions, we divided the Zerlaut farm into toplands and bottomlands. The toplands supported woodlots of maple and beech, fields of corn and alfalfa, and apple orchards. The bottom-lands were deep, dark ravines shadowed beneath thick canopies of hemlock. I’d sometimes have to go down into those ravine bottoms in the mid-afternoon and then sit in my tree until total darkness. If I got down early, I might ruin my dad’s hunt, which I didn’t want to do, because at that point he was the meanest, most unpredictable man I’d ever known. So I’d wait until I could barely see the ground beneath me, and then I’d climb down out of my tree and start heading uphill. The woods sounded as if they were crawling with dangerous creatures. I’d carry an arrow in my hand to defend myself against who knows what, and I’d say the alphabet under my breath just to give myself something to think about. I’d worry about Matt and Danny coming out of the woods where they were hiding. It seemed like I had to go miles to get out of there. I wouldn’t feel any safer until I entered the fields on the toplands and caught a glimpse of my dad’s flashlight across the field. My dad used to whip me and my brothers now and then with his belt until we wet our pants, one time just because one of us left a pair of bull-nose pliers lying out in the yard. That I’d actually feel safe with that man coming out of the woods says a lot about my irrational fears of the wilderness.

I get down to the Chetaslina and unload the front shoulder on top of the other legs that I already hauled down. I don’t want to wrestle that thing all the way back to my camp in the dark, but I do load a few smaller cuts so that I’m not going back empty-handed. Once I’m loaded up, I turn off my headlamp and wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark. I don’t hear any more footsteps or cracking brush. The river is quieter now, too, as the slush melted during the warmth of the day. The moon is hidden behind the ridge on the other side of the river, but its light is bright as it comes through the open sky above the water. The crusted snow makes it even shinier. The gravel crunches under my feet as I move down-river. I measure my downstream progress against the ridge of land that rises up between the two branches of the Chetaslina. I pass the ridge, and I know that I’ve covered about a mile of ground. I’m downstream of any fresh bear tracks, and I start to relax a bit. I’ve got to cross the Chetaslina in the dark, which will be a pain in the ass, but at least I won’t have to think about grizzlies until tomorrow. Then something bizarre happens. It hits me like a flash of light on the left side of my head, and I duck to the right as I let out a yell and throw up my arm. The burst of fright has barely left my mouth when I realize what has attacked me. There’s a bright blob hanging in the sky, peeking out from the edge of the ridge. I just tried to dodge the moon.

                  14                  

A
T FRONTIER SETTLEMENTS
on the Canadian prairie, men used to dig gigantic square pits in the ground before the winter freeze. These pits were as big as basements. Then, when it got cold and the rivers froze, they’d cut blocks of ice with saws and pave the floor of the pits. They’d pour water into the cracks between the blocks and let it freeze up and cement everything together. After the floor was prepared, the walls were built up in the same way. With everything ready, hunters would go out and kill hundreds of buffalo and cut the carcasses into quarters with the skin still on. When the meat froze, they’d pack it into the pit as tight as possible, cap it off with straw and then cover it with a roof to keep out rain and sun. The meat would stay frozen all through the next spring and summer, and it would be more tender and flavorful than fresh game.

I’m reminded of this now because all of the meat is frozen stiff. I just took my second-to-last load of meat down from the kill site to the Chetaslina. I had the skull strapped to the outside of my pack, and I was extra careful coming down the slick hill with those sharp horns jutting out. Now I’m heading back up to fetch the hide, and my hip’s still making that clicking noise from when I fell. Thankfully, my trail gets better and better with each pass. I drop my pack in the area where I heard something crashing around in the brush the night before. I check for tracks, but it’s hard to find any because half of the snow is melted and the rest is all crusted over and dappled from yesterday’s dripping slush. If I hadn’t actually seen those two bears a few days earlier, I’d be tempted to think of them as ghosts by now. On the edge of a meadow I do find a patch of rose hips that are frozen and not dried out too badly. I haven’t eaten anything sugary in a few days, so I stop long enough to have some. They’ve got waxy skins and lots of seeds, but they’re not bad if you’re in the right mood.

The hide’s frozen as stiff as thick waxed cardboard, which actually makes it easier to handle. After putting a fresh sharpen on my large knife, I start filleting away the gristle and meat and orange-tinged fat. I throw the gristle into the bushes and the pieces of fat into a sack that I’ve been filling. The process leaves behind nice clean leather, white and soft. I kindle a small fire off to the side of where I’m working, so when my fingers get too cold I can flick them through the flames.

When archaeologists dig up ancient buffalo kill sites, they’ll sometimes uncover buffalo skeletons that are still “articulated,” meaning that whoever killed the buffalo hadn’t cut them into pieces. All of the bones will be lying in their proper places, the way you’d imagine a human skeleton inside a casket. Often, articulated skeletons will be missing their tailbones. This used to puzzle archaeologists, but then someone realized that Indians removed the tails along with the hides when they skinned buffalo. The tailless, articulated skeletons were likely killed for skins.

Traveling through North Dakota, I once visited a kill site along the Missouri River where Indians corralled buffalo into a trap at the bottom of a coulee a few hundred years ago. There’s a flat bench of land next to the coulee where archaeologists believe that the Indians fleshed the hides using small flint knives known as thumb scrapers. Now the site happens to be on land administered by the Nature Conservancy, and there’s a small herd of buffalo living behind a fence there. The buffalo like to hang out on that bench of ground, and they’ve scratched out big wallows there. The wallows are the only places not covered in thick grass, and when I was digging around in the dirt in the bottoms, I found all kinds of flint shards and broken thumb scrapers left over from those people fleshing buffalo all those years ago. It was one of those bizarre collisions of present and past that seem to occur whenever you spend time around buffalo.

As I’m fleshing, I now and then have to put my hand against the fur side of the hide in order to provide some back pressure against my knife’s blade. The fur feels good against my hand, especially in the area of the animal’s rump and midsection. The hair is velvety and thick, luxuriant. Buffalo can exhibit a variety of hair types, in the same way that humans have wavy hair or straight hair, or thick or thin hair. The rarer varieties were often quite valuable. Hunters were always on the lookout for what they called mouse robes, which were more bluish in color and had long, fine fur. In Montana, maybe one out of a hundred buffalo had a mouse robe. Another popular type of buffalo hide was known as a beaver hide. These were chestnut brown and had exceptionally fine, wavy fur. Indians liked so-called beaver robes because of their beauty and comfort; hide hunters liked beaver robes because they could sell them for up to twenty-five times the price of a normal buffalo hide.

By far, the most valuable buffalo hides were taken from white, or albino, buffalo. These were extraordinarily rare.
^*
Albino calves have a difficult time surviving into adulthood because the lack of protective melanin in their eyes is a vicious detriment on the sun-drenched, shadeless prairie; most white buffalo probably died from complications of blindness long before an arrow or bullet found them. Most Plains tribes, including the Blackfoot, Mandan, Lakota, and Cheyenne, considered the white buffalo a figure of great religious significance.
^†
They believed in variations of the same story line; the Lakota version holds that the tribe’s sacred ritual of the pipe was given to them by a beautiful woman known as White Buffalo Cow Woman (sometimes White Buffalo Calf Woman). After instructing the tribal ancestors in the sacred rituals, White Buffalo Cow Woman walked toward the setting sun. She stopped and rolled over in the dirt and turned into a black buffalo. She rolled again and turned into a brown buffalo, and then into a red buffalo. After her fourth and final roll, she emerged as a white buffalo and disappeared.

While many Plains Indians revered the white buffalo and anticipated the return of White Buffalo Cow Woman, they maintained the seemingly paradoxical habit of killing every white buffalo they ran into. If one of the animals was killed, its hide was handled with great caution. According to a Euro-American explorer, the Gros Ventre Indians believed that if a white buffalo died in a buffalo jump, they could not touch any of the animals that it perished with. If a Cheyenne hunter killed a white buffalo, it was forbidden for him or anyone in his tribe to eat the meat.
^*
The hunter himself was not permitted to skin the animal. Instead, he had to hire another man to do it. Women were not allowed to handle the white hides, ever. There was a Mandan chief named White Buffalo Robe Unfolded whose people were particularly avid connoisseurs of white buffalo hides. In the early 1830s, the German explorer and ethnologist Prince Maximilian passed through the Mandan villages along the Missouri River. He explained that the mere ownership of a white buffalo hide trumped all other accomplishments that a person could strive for in life. “Suppose two men to be disputing about their exploits,” wrote the prince, “the one an old veteran warrior, who has slain many enemies, the other, a young lad without experience; the latter reproaches the other with never having possessed a white buffalo cow hide, on which the old man droops his head, and covers his face for shame.”

Author with the world’s largest buffalo, July 2007.

According to the famed hide hunter J. Wright Mooar, only six or seven white buffalo were ever killed by white men. He himself shot two of those. He downed his first white buffalo in Kansas; his second came out of Scurry County, Texas, in October 1876, the only white buffalo ever killed by a white man in that state. The animal’s hide was featured at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, and Teddy Roosevelt offered Mooar $5,000 for it. After selling twenty thousand hides for a couple dollars apiece, Mooar for some reason turned down Roosevelt’s offer.

I’ve never seen a white buffalo, though not because I haven’t tried. One summer, I took a long weekend and drove almost a thousand miles round trip just to attend a white buffalo’s eleventh birthday party at the National Buffalo Museum in Jamestown, North Dakota. I flew into Minneapolis and drove west along I-94 to exit 258, mostly following signs for the world’s largest buffalo. I was picturing an actual creature, pumped full of bovine growth hormones. Instead, it’s a beast built of steel beams, wire mesh, and stucco: twenty-six feet high, forty-six feet long, and weighing in at sixty tons. The animal is anatomically proportioned, right down to the scrotum. A kid pointed at the painted stucco sac and asked his dad, “What the heck is that?” The dad said, “That’s a
male
buffalo.”

Down the hill from the giant buffalo was the albino White Cloud’s home, a large fenced pasture containing grassland and a heavily wooded creek bottom. The albino buffalo was born on July 10, and in honor of her birthday the museum had established the Tatanka Festival. I was there early in the morning, which I’d heard was a good time to catch a glimpse of White Cloud—she’s known to abhor direct sunlight and prefers to graze early in the morning or late in the evening, when the sun’s angle isn’t so fierce. A dozen or so people were lined up along the fence, staring toward the creek bottom and, beyond, I-94. However, White Cloud seemed to be taking her birthday off. I saw a pair of coyotes, and my gaze on the animals was intent enough that a couple of other tourists stopped to ask me if I saw White Cloud. We stood around and watched the coyotes as they skulked around in the grass, but eventually everyone left.

I’d come a long way, and I had no intention of leaving without a glimpse. The festival included free pony rides, an old car show, a horseshoe tournament, a piano recital, a breakfast sponsored by the American Legion, and a grilled-buffalo luncheon. I was perfectly prepared to miss all of that. I walked back and forth along the fence, seeking an angle of view into the thickest thickets along the stream. I saw another coyote and realized that they had a den back in there. The temperature touched into the eighties. I left long enough to get a bottle of water and a buffalo steak and then hurried back. At one point, when no one was looking, I jumped a fence into an off-limits area to have a look around, but I didn’t have the nerve to jump the main fence into White Cloud’s pasture. I imagined flushing her out of the brush and giving everyone a good look. I also imagined getting hauled off in a squad car.

The sun traveled across its path toward the western half of the sky. I could hear the talent show taking place off in the distance. A while later I heard the talent show end. A worker started going around and locking up the buildings in Frontier Village. The coyotes came out and sat on a mound of dirt behind their den. Someone told me that it was lockup time and the museum was closing. I nodded but didn’t budge. Thirty minutes later another guy came in a pickup to tell me to leave. I said sure, but he idled there like he wanted to see it happen. I still haven’t seen a white buffalo.

YOU’LL SOMETIMES HEAR
modern-day hunters use the word “collect” as a euphemism for “kill”; for instance, a guy might come back from an African safari and brag that he “collected thirteen head.” Trophy hunters are particularly inclined to say that word, and I used to hate trophy hunters. I felt that they were reducing the notion of a species down to nothing more than large horns and overgrown hides, and that their ethic was vulgar and wasteful and a general discredit to hunters. I’ve begun to see that the issue is actually much more complicated now and that collecting is not necessarily antithetical to wise usage. After all, I’m going to eat hundreds of pounds of this buffalo’s meat, right down to the marrow inside its bones. But someday, probably in a year or so, the meat will be gone. If it weren’t for this buffalo hide, which I’ll likely sleep under and take naps on top of for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t have anything tangible to remind me of the wonderful days that I’ve spent out here. In that sense, it’s a trophy and I’m a trophy hunter. However, it’s not one of those special emblems that would only come from a lifetime of handling thousands or millions of buffalo hides; it’s not a beaver robe or a mouse robe or a magical white buffalo robe. I don’t believe that I’ve earned one of those. I don’t believe that I’m so experienced with these animals that I require abstractions as a way of understanding their deepest meaning. All the meaning and symbolism that I’ll probably ever need is right here: a perfectly typical hide taken from a perfectly typical buffalo, the first and last buffalo that I will ever kill.