American Buffalo (26 page)

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T
HE MOSQUITOES ARE THICK
in the warm June air, buzzing around my ears and crawling across the mesh of my head net. Danny’s stretched out on the ground just ahead of me, belly down, his feet next to my head. His left pant leg has risen up to his calf, and the skin above the top of his boot is red and puffy from so many bites. I smash a cluster of the mosquitoes with my gloved hand and leave a tangle of broken legs and wings sticking to his sweaty skin. I tuck his pant leg back into his boot. Danny looks over his shoulder and motions me forward. I crawl along, following the crest of a beaver dam. The mosquitoes lift away from our clothes like dust rising from a shook rug. Once I move forward a few body lengths, I can see the direction that the buffalo are coming from. Off a ways, toward the river, a wallowing bull kicks up a poof of dry glacial flour. We hold steady, and soon I can see their backs coming in over the tops of the willows, heading into the wind and toward us. About fifty of them. Fist-sized clumps of chocolate brown wool are shedding away from their humps. Their tails swat back and forth, chasing bugs. As the herd draws near, I begin to see the reddish glimpses of what I’ve been hoping to find: buffalo calves. The closest should pass within a few yards.

It’s been eight months since I killed the buffalo. My feet still aren’t right. When my weight is off of them, like now, I can feel the tingling numbness of frostbite creeping back into my toes and the backs of my heels. The sensation always reminds me of that cold night when I floated into the Copper River. Hardcore Jeffy climbed into the water and snagged the buffalo’s severed knee joint as I floated past. My ice-crusted pack raft swung around in the current downstream from his body, and he pulled me to the bank. I writhed on the floor of the tent while wrapped in sleeping bags, the heat moving back into me like a hot wire brush going through the veins of my legs.

In the morning I was back on my feet. We rafted the meat and gear down the Copper River and then loaded it into a pickup near the village of Chitina. I spent the next three days at Danny’s house in Anchorage butchering the buffalo meat, converting the hunks of red flesh into wrapped and frozen steaks, roasts, sausages, and burgers. I minced the scraps of gristle and boiled them into dog food for my friends’ pets. I sawed the marrowbones into inch-and-a-half disks, then baked the disks on a cookie sheet until the fatty white insides spilled out like banana slugs; they tasted like buffalo-meat concentrate. I pickled the tongue and braised it in homemade sauerkraut from cabbages grown in my brother Matt’s garden. I sawed up the shank bones and made osso buco with my own homegrown tomatoes, then took the leftover bits of picked-clean bone and boiled them down into an assortment of stocks and glazes. I bleached the skull for a decoration and sent the hide to a commercial tannery.

Finally, months later, I thawed out some bags of the carotene-rich fat and rendered them down into a few quart-sized jars of lard the color of diluted carrot juice. One night I took a handful of the liquefied fat and styled my hair into a wild shape, some kind of crazed buffalo warrior. By then I knew that I had to come back up here. Remembering the cold air and the death of the buffalo made me want to witness the opposites, warmth and birth. Bushpilot Dave made two separate trips to fly Danny and me up the Chetaslina valley in his Super Cub, going low and slow at eight hundred feet. We traveled some twenty miles beyond the old kill site, all the way up to the herd’s summering grounds at the foot of the glacier. Dave dropped us off on a gravel bar with our backpacks and a couple days’ worth of food. We took a GPS waypoint on the improvised landing strip and then set off in search of the animals.

Of the twenty-four hunters who were issued permits for DI454, only four of us killed a buffalo by the end of the seven-month season. The replacements for those animals are coming toward me now. There are a dozen calves in all, maybe more, though the adults are leading the herd. A young bull locks its eyes on me, some strange mound sticking out of a beaver dam. I don’t move, and I control my breath so that my back doesn’t rise and fall. When the bull goes back to eating, I can hear its teeth ripping the willow leaves. Its breath is like a soft snore, rising and falling. A calf passes so close that I could jump out and touch it, though that would likely get me a major ass kicking from its mother. It abandons a willow that it’s been nibbling in order to nurse. The cow is getting tired of this routine. She brings her back knee forward to smack his head and chase him off; the calf protests by charging back in. He bangs the top of his skull against her udder until she relents and lets her milk drop. The calf feeds frantically for a few seconds and then trots off away from the herd, bucking and kicking. It occurs to me that this buffalo calf has probably never seen a human. Most likely, a human has never seen it.

A bull and cow along the upper Chetaslina, June 2006.

There’s beauty in the young calf’s unknowingness, in the mystery of its wild and remote existence. My quest to understand the buffalo has carried me across several years and thousands of miles, yet only rarely have I been able to see the animal in the way that I see this calf—as an untethered beast living outside human context and beyond the reach of human history. But my enjoyment of this animal as a simple biological being is short-lived; within seconds, my concentration is broken by a question that I’ve been struggling with for the past few months—how can I claim to love the very thing that I worked so hard to kill? I’ve thought of this often lately, yet I haven’t been able to answer it with force and conviction. For now, I rely on a response that is admittedly glib: I just do, and I always will.

In a historical sense, I suppose that my confused and convoluted relationship to the buffalo is nothing new. For the entirety of man’s existence in North America, we’ve struggled with the meaning of this animal, with the ways in which its life is intertwined with our own. I think of the first hunters who walked through some long-ago gap between glaciers and stumbled onto a landscape populated with strange and massive creatures. The buffalo was just one of many then, a giant among a host of other giants, but over time these many animals were whittled away by the forces of man and nature. Eventually the buffalo stood alone, the continent’s greatest beast, like the winning contestant in a game show.

Herd crossing the upper Chetaslina, June 2006.

Its prize was humanity’s never-ending attention, which was ultimately a bittersweet award. For thousands of years, the first people of North America fed on the buffalo’s meat and wore the buffalo’s skin, and then made a deity of the animal as a way of reconciling their need to slaughter the thing that granted them life. My own European ancestors came to the New World and scoffed at the heathen nature of the Indians’ ideas, then stood by as the buffalo nearly vanished from the earth beneath their notion that the animal was an expendable gift of their own God, a commodity meant to get them started before stepping aside and letting “civilization” bloom in the wilderness.

I sometimes imagine that we saved the buffalo from the brink of extinction for the simple reason that the animal provided a handy mirror in which we could see our innermost desires and failures, and our most confounding contradictions. Our efforts to use the buffalo as a looking glass have rendered the animal almost inscrutable. At once it is a symbol of the tenacity of wilderness and the destruction of wilderness; it’s a symbol of Native American culture and the death of Native American culture; it’s a symbol of the strength and vitality of America and the pettiness and greed of America; it represents a frontier both forgotten and remembered; it stands for freedom and captivity, extinction and salvation. Perhaps the buffalo’s enduring strength and legacy come from this chameleonic wizardry, this ability to provide whatever we need at the given moment. Maybe that’s what the sculptor James Earle Fraser had in mind when he put the buffalo on the American nickel. In pursuit of a timeless design, he gave us an image that will never lose its meaning, whatever that meaning might ultimately be.

I think of a day last February when I went to Yellowstone National Park, at a point about forty miles away from where I unearthed the buffalo skull years before on that warm September afternoon. I’d come to the park to watch Nez Percé Indians kill buffalo near the northern border as a way to exercise treaty rights that their forefathers had negotiated with the U.S. government many generations ago. The Nez Percé had not hunted the park since 1877, and their plans to kill buffalo generated a firestorm of local interest. Along with dozens of spectators, including hunters, game wardens, protesters, tribal police, Department of Homeland Security officers, county sheriffs, and the merely curious, I watched as a group of young hunters, many of them teenagers, gunned down five buffalo amid a long volley of firing. The animals staggered around in the snow, leaving vivid trails of blood that flowed from poorly placed head shots. When the fifth buffalo finally fell, everyone, no matter their reason for being there, breathed a long sigh of relief.