American Buffalo (5 page)

We went into a small room containing workbenches and several devices that looked like elaborate refrigerators with labels reading “Thermo Cryotechnics.” I unsheathed the skull and laid it on the counter. Beth fitted a cutting wheel that was the size of a quarter to a Dremel tool and plugged the tool in. It made a faint whirring sound. “With bison, I like to cut right here,” she said, pointing to a thick section of bone between the horn’s base and the eye socket.

To reduce surface contaminants, Beth used the tool to scrape away the outside of the bone. She only needed about a gram, so the area she cleaned was less than an inch square. The bone on the surface turned to fine powder, and the smell of burning hair filled the room and penetrated my face mask. “Ancient DNA is already in shitty condition,” she said, “so I want to get as good a sample of bone as I can. Usually, I can tell by the way they smell whether they still have good DNA in them.”

Author and skull at the Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre at Oxford University.

“Does it have the right smell?” I asked.

“Pretty good,” she said.

“So you think it’s going to work, then?” I asked.

Beth continued cutting. “I give it fifty-fifty,” she said.

When she turned off the saw, Beth picked up a small tool that looked like a dentist’s implement and used it to pry out the rectangular block of bone that she’d cut. It was about as big as two Chiclets set side by side, and twice as thick. She cut the block into two squares and gave me one in case I decided to submit it to a laboratory for radiocarbon dating. She placed the second sample of bone in a heavy-duty stainless steel canister containing a steel ball bearing. The canister was fitted into a machine labeled “Mikro-Dismembrator.” The machine shook the canister so fast that it was a blur. The ball bearing inside the canister pulverized the bone into a fine powder. Beth then poured the powder into a test tube and capped the tube. She labeled it No. 43, and it went into a rack of a hundred such tubes containing powdered bone from extinct species of Siberian yaks and bison. Mixed in at random were empty tubes. She makes sure that the results from those empty tubes are negative, to ensure that they are not contaminated with ambient bits of modern DNA.

That was as much of the process as Beth could show me, and it was as much as I could readily understand. The actual act of extracting the DNA is mind-boggling in its complexity, and mostly takes place inside elaborate, sensitive machinery. As Beth walked me to a bus stop, she told me that it would take about a month before she had results. I flew home, as anxious as if I were waiting for the outcome of a girlfriend’s pregnancy test. I counted down the days until I hit the number thirty, and then I placed a call to Beth’s office. She sounded dejected. “I was hoping to get some really old bison DNA from Montana,” she said.

“So it’s not old?” I asked. “It’s not some weird, ancient form of bygone buffalo?”

“I can’t tell you how old it is,” she said. “But I can tell you that, genetically, it matches a modern bison.”

“A regular ol’ American buffalo?” I asked.

“If that’s how you want to put it, then yes,” she said. “An American buffalo.”

At this point, the gram-sized piece that Beth had given me began to burn a hole in my pocket. It costs about $700 to get a radiocarbon date from a piece of bone, and I’d been waiting for Beth’s results before I dropped the money. If she determined that my skull was from an ancient form of the animal, I’d save my cash. But if it was from a modern form of the animal, I thought it would be cool if I could link it to some specific date that pertained to human history. Plus, by now I’d become addicted to the highs and lows of scientific inquiry. I padded a one-gram piece of the skull with cotton balls and stuffed it into an empty Tic Tac container along with a check for $675. I placed that into a padded envelope and addressed it to Beta Analytic of Miami, Florida. Again, the pleasure of anticipation coursed through my veins.

Radiocarbon dating works something like this: Through photosynthesis, plants take up carbon-14, a naturally occurring radioactive isotope that is produced by cosmic rays entering the earth’s atmosphere. Through the consumption of plant materials, or through the consumption of organisms that eat plant materials, the carbon-14 passes into every other living organism on earth—it’s inside of you, your dog, your goldfish, your house plants, and your goldfish’s food. Organisms accumulate the isotope at the same ratio as it occurs in the atmosphere, and the accumulation process stops when the organism dies. From then on, the carbon-14 begins to decay with a half-life of 5,730 years. Through some laboratory wizardry, it’s possible to examine the rate of decay of the remaining carbon-14 in an organism’s tissues and then infer how long the thing’s been dead.

I waited over a month for my results. In the meantime, I followed a somewhat related series of articles that appeared in the
Billings Gazette
about the U.S. Mint’s ten-year, fifty-state commemorative-quarter program. Montana’s quarter was scheduled for a 2007 release, and the state had begun its selection process in the summer of 2005, when Governor Brian Schweitzer’s office put out a call for designs.

Hundreds of proposals were submitted. Suggestions included a flaming skeleton riding a motorcycle; a can of beer and a pork chop sandwich; a grizzly bear; “dudes riding three-wheeled ATVs on a hill”; a picture of Lewis and Clark; and the Unabomber’s cabin in Lincoln, Montana. Some ideas were thrown out for being obscene, some were thrown out for being illegal (you can’t use the state symbol on a coin), and others were rejected for being non-coinable, which is the U.S. Mint’s term for a design that is too complicated. The governor proposed the novel idea that Montana’s quarter be minted in palladium, a white metal mined in Montana, but federal law mandates the use of silver.

The six-person selection committee appointed by Schweitzer eventually nominated four ideas: a bull elk; a landscape featuring the sun; a landscape featuring a river; and a buffalo skull. The four ideas were submitted to the U.S. Mint for preliminary design, and the U.S. Mint returned the four ideas in coin form. The images were placed on an Internet-based ballot. The
Billings Gazette
announced the final decision on June 30, 2006, just as I was struggling with my radiocarbon purchase. The story appeared amid a collection of state headlines dominated by stories about car crashes, crystal meth, murder, and a plan to give birth control to wild horses: the elk pulled 30 percent, the sun and the river each nabbed around 18 percent, and the buffalo skull landed 34 percent of the vote. The choice seemed to tear the state apart. Someone pointed out that more people had voted against the skull than had voted for it. Comments flooded in to the
Gazette
:

The entire process made me feel as though my personal feelings (and cash expenditures) were being put to a public forum. By now, a couple of years had passed since I’d found the skull, and I’d been carrying it from home to home and state to state, trying to find some way to describe what it meant. Not just what it meant to me, but also what it
meant
meant, in a larger way. All I could come up with was that I liked being near it and that I enjoyed staring at it. I described it as somehow symbolic of the American experience, but I could never really put this sentiment into the proper words. Now I felt as though my whole enterprise with the buffalo skull was being mocked. I pictured myself as an oddball variant of those folks who spend their time and money trying to prove that they are descended from European royalty.

But the story with the skull had a satisfactory ending after all. When my radiocarbon results arrived in the mail, I discovered that my buffalo skull’s official age was, in the jargon of radiocarbon dating, 150 +/– 40 BP. Calibrated to calendar years, that meant the buffalo was no older than
A.D.
1660. Because the bone did not contain radioactive bomb carbon from atmospheric testing of nuclear warheads, it was no younger than
A.D.
1960.

The first thing I said was, “A three-hundred-year span of time was the best that these people could do for $675?” I was tempted to call the Better Business Bureau, but first I dialed up Darden Hood, of Beta Analytic, to see what he had to say for himself. He politely explained a few things to me, such as the “heliomagnetic modulation of the galactic cosmos,” “geomagnetic variations,” and the “intercepts between the average radiocarbon age and the calibrated curve timescale.” That information helped him to explain, in a roundabout way, why organic materials from the past few hundred years are less reliably datable than materials from the past few thousand years.

I sank into a mild carbon-dating depression. Then one day I was reading something by an archaeologist with the National Park Service named Kenneth P. Cannon. He was discussing a buffalo skull with the exact same radiocarbon date as mine, 150 +/– BP, which was analyzed by Beta Analytic of Miami, Florida. Cannon writes, “Statistically, this bison likely died in the early to mid-18th century.”

I called Kenneth Cannon at his office in Lincoln, Nebraska, and told him about my little problem.
^*
He knows Darden, has worked with him for years. He explained that Darden’s job is to accurately calculate radiocarbon dates, “not interpret results.” “There’s always going to be a level of variability in calculation and interpretation,” explained Ken. But he did help shed some light on my results. He explained that there’s a 95 percent chance that my buffalo died between
A.D.
1720 and
A.D.
1880, and a 66 percent chance that it died within a few decades of
A.D.
1750. For the sake of patriotic nostalgia, it’s fun to think that my American buffalo might have died in 1776. And because the animal was found at such a high elevation, nine thousand feet, it’s apparent that he died in the snow-free season of summertime. While I’m not going so far as to suggest that he died on July 4, 1776, you can’t say for sure that he didn’t. Now, when people come over to my house, I’ll usually point at the skull and say, “See that? That buffalo might have been alive when they signed the Declaration of Independence.” I can never decide if there is irony in that statement, or nostalgia, or what, so I usually just let the statement stand on its own. People fill the silence by walking over and picking it up.

                  5                  

T
HINK OF THE SHAPE
of the letter D. The curved arc of the letter’s right side is the fifty-mile stretch of the Copper River that I’m going to float in search of buffalo. The vertical line at the letter’s left side is the forty-mile stretch of highway south of Copper Center, a small village that lies just south of Glennallen. Where the two lines meet, at the top and bottom of the D, are two places where my partners and I can get a truck close enough to the river to load and unload gear into a raft. The lower part is near the town of Tonsina, where there’s a little road off the highway that salmon fishermen use to access their fish traps. I’ve got a buddy’s truck parked down there with the keys hidden under the front-left tire. We’ll use that truck at the end of the trip, rather than hitchhiking back to where we are now, at the top of the D.

Specifically, the top of the D is where the Klutina River passes below the Richardson Highway just before flowing into the Copper River, which is less than a mile downstream from me. My brother Danny and I are staring at a bunch of gear strewn up and down the riverbank while two of our buddies, Matt Rafferty and Jeff Jessen, inflate the raft with a pair of hand-powered pumps. The four of us are going to travel downriver and hunt together for a few days. If we don’t find a buffalo in that amount of time, I’ll stay behind in Wrangell–St. Elias and they’ll come back with the raft to pick me up at some later date.

Jeff Jessen near the Copper/Klutina confluence.

Right now, we’re sorting through gear, trying to determine how much we can bring. Usually you can pack everything you want in a raft, right down to cases of beer. But this situation is different, because Danny and I are trying to imagine what the raft’s going to look like with eight hundred pounds of buffalo parts in it. It’s highly speculative work. For starters, we don’t really know if we’re going to find a buffalo, let alone how big it will be. Second, we don’t know how much water we’ll have to float the raft in. The air temperature dropped into the teens last night, and the edges of the Klutina are frozen in a skein of ice. Boulders in the middle of the river are capped with frozen splash water, so they look as slick and shiny as greased bowling balls. A few more cold nights like this will set off a chain of events: the glaciers that feed the Copper’s tributaries will slow down in their melting; water levels in the Copper River will drop; more and more rocks and gravel bars will rise above the water’s surface; the raft will drag on the bottom more often; we’ll have to unload the boat to get it unstuck; we’ll start wishing like hell that we hadn’t packed so much gear.

My brother Danny is particularly in tune to the workings of rivers because he’s a freshwater ecologist with the University of Alaska. He’s coming along because we have an unspoken brotherly tie that says he has to. Our companions, Rafferty and Jessen, are in tune to the doings of rivers because they’re both whitewater enthusiasts. They’re coming along partly because it’s their raft and partly because they’re hoping to get their hands on a bit of free-range organic buffalo meat. I first became aware of Jessen, a hospital administrator, and Rafferty, an environmental activist, while hanging around at backyard barbecues in Anchorage. The town has a thriving community of people in their twenties and thirties who moved to the state looking for wilderness thrills, and these folks get drawn into summertime salmon cookouts like raccoons to garbage. You’ll find out about common acquaintances while talking about getting lost on a mountain, or digging clams, or flipping a boat in a river while hunting caribou. During such conversations, I heard that Jessen once spent ten days holed up in a snow cave during a blizzard on a mountain. I heard about how Rafferty was watching a grizzly bear one day when another grizzly bear came along and killed it and ate its guts. Another time, I heard a story about how the two of them were rafting with some friends when a landslide peeled off a mountain and came ripping down the slope, trees and all. A descending tree limb grabbed a girl’s life jacket and, as my friend described it, “deposited her in the river like an anchor. She just vanished. Then the limb broke, and she came popping back up.” The landslide caused a minor tsunami that beached the raft so far up on the riverbank that they had to drag the boat back down to the water.

The number of weird things that happen to a person in the wild is directly proportional to how much time that person spends in the wild, and I figured that these would be some useful guys to have around. Danny had met Rafferty a couple times but he’d never hung out with him for that long; he knew Jessen a little bit better, and described him to me as having an infectious enthusiasm that would be suitable to a used-car salesman. He arranged for the three of us to meet for a beer at Humpy’s, a popular downtown Anchorage bar on West Sixth Avenue. Jessen is short and stocky, with a square build and slightly crooked teeth. He was wearing a wool jacket with a yoked back and oversized buttons, and his fingers were nicked up with many little cuts. I’d been prepared to talk Jessen into making the trip, but no such persuasion was necessary. He ordered a beer and a blackened-halibut sandwich, rolled out a few maps, and jumped right into the nitty-gritty details of what it would take to float the Copper River. When we left, Jessen said, “I can’t totally commit until I talk this over with Rafferty. It’s his raft, too.”

I awaited Jessen’s call for a week, but he never got back to me. I called him, and he didn’t call me back. I couldn’t imagine what the problem was. I’d been blown off, and for no good reason! After eight days had passed, I started to work out a whole new set of plans that didn’t rely on anyone else’s input. Then one night Danny was hanging out at a party and talking about buffalo hunting with some guy, and the guy says, “I heard that Matt Rafferty’s going on a buffalo hunt, too.”

“What?” Danny said. “Are you serious? With who?”

“I don’t know. I guess Jeff Jessen knows someone who has a brother who drew a buffalo tag for the Copper River.”

“That’s
my
brother,” said Danny. “That’s us!”

NEAR ITS CONFLUENCE
with the Copper River, the Klutina flows through a narrow channel bracketed by heavy stands of spruce trees and steep banks formed by fist- and head-sized rocks. We can only see what is immediately in front of us on the sharp bends, so our course down the river relies on snap decisions. Danny and I are sitting toward the bow of the raft, me on the starboard side and Danny on port. We’re each wearing a dry suit, these one-piece jobbies with watertight zippers, built-in bootees, and neoprene gaskets that cinch around your neck and wrists to prevent the intrusion of liquid. Basically, it’s like wearing a body-sized latex condom, except it’s your neck that emerges through the opening rather than the base of your pecker. Pulled over layers of heavy clothes, the suits restrict our movements and make our paddling sluggish. Rafferty and Jessen are at the stern, shouting out commands. “Hard on left . . . No, hard on right . . . Hard on right, go, go
go.
” We maneuver the raft like a tank on tracks; the sharpest turns are executed by moving one side forward and the other side backward. When I turn around, I see that Rafferty has a big grin on his face. He’s got a runner’s build, tall and thin, with blond hair capped by a tasseled hat. He seems like the kind of guy who’d be happy even if he had to shovel horse shit—so long as it was next to whitewater.

The confluence of the two rivers reminds me of the junction where an alleyway meets an expressway. During the peak spring runoff, the Klutina dumps an average of 7,080 cubic feet of water per second into the Copper River, which itself carries an annual average of 57,400 cubic feet per second. That’s like having 57,400 soccer balls roll past you in the time that it takes you to say “one-Mississippi.” But the soccer balls do not roll by in one heavy mass; instead, they are broken into many different channels, or braids. In places, the Copper River is split into six or more braids, stretched across a mile-wide floodplain. The braids twist together and split apart like frayed rope, tangling themselves around scores of long, narrow islands. The river is constantly moving these islands, at once destroying some and creating others. If an island can hold for a few years, it becomes armored with a carpeting of sedges and willows that help to hold it in place.

I’m struck by the lunar appearance of the river, its stark grayness. Essentially, the river’s floodplain is composed of a vast, deep expanse of glacial debris. Eighteen percent of the Copper Basin is covered in glaciers, which pulverize the surrounding mountains into something known to geologists as glacial till. The finest glacial till is called rock flour, particles so small and fine that they turn the water the color of potter’s clay. Every year, the Copper River carries about sixty-nine million tons of debris to the ocean, or about thirty-five times the total amount of debris that was hauled away during cleanup after the destruction of the World Trade Center.

In places, the meandering channels of the Copper River are eating away at the steep hillsides, which border the floodplain. The river takes away slices of the hillsides in vertical chunks—think of cutting a meat loaf into slices that fall away intact or else crumble into the pan. Some of the eroded slopes are one hundred or more feet high. Within the first few miles of our float, I watch erosion happen several times. As we float along, little pebbles and puffs of dirt fall away from the banks and trail into the river. Sometimes the falling debris knocks off more rocks and dirt, creating miniature landslides. Above these eroded banks, the vegetative mats of the forest hang over the precipices like heads of foam tilting over the lips of overfilled glasses of beer. Trees that reach too far over the cliffs tend to lose their footing and plunge down into the river en masse. We pass several places where dozens of trees have come down at once in great tangles of wood. The limbs, still springy with life, wave in the current and emit swishing sounds. Trees that have spent a season or two in the river are stripped of their limbs and bark. They look like perfect telephone poles, except they are still attached to their root wads. If you sank one of these trees in the ground upside down, it would look like a long-stemmed flower with a wooden blossom.

In part, the buffalo chose to live in this specific area because of the erosion. There are steep bluffs a half mile away from the water, evidence that the river has changed its course and volume many times over the millennia; with the river no longer sloughing away at their bases, the cliffs taper off and vegetation takes hold. Sedges, grasses, and wildflowers carpet the soft soil of the hillsides, but trees don’t hold as easily. The lack of trees exposes the bluffs to the sun and wind. In the winter, the wind carries the snow away, and the sun helps to melt it. While the buffalo might prefer to winter among the thick stands of willows along the river, at times these bluffs provide the only food for many miles that is not encased in snow and ice.

When it comes to the cold, buffalo have a lot of anatomical tricks up their sleeves. Proportionate to body size, the buffalo’s trachea is larger than that of any other large land mammal; when it takes a breath of cold air, the air is pre-warmed inside the trachea before it moves down to the animal’s lungs. This way, ambient air temperatures have a diminished effect on the animal’s core body temperature, which is 101.6 degrees Fahrenheit. A buffalo’s coat of hair is another handy adaptation. The hair above its eyes is so short that it looks like someone buzzed it with an electric clipper. This shortness prevents freezing water from accumulating against sensitive eye tissues. Domestic cattle have longer hair around their eyeballs and are commonly blinded by gobs of ice. With dark hair growing out of black skin, buffalo can absorb much more warmth from the sun than light-skinned and light-haired critters. And their hair is thick. On their mid-rib, female buffalo calves have about 2,992 hair fibers per square centimeter, while males have a bit fewer, at 2,182. (The total number of hair follicles on an animal is constant throughout its life. So as it gets bigger, the hairs are less dense because they’re spread over a greater amount of space.) The hair densities of cattle are highly variable between individual animals, but Holstein cattle have hair densities ranging from 550 to 1,095 follicles per square centimeter.