American Buffalo (13 page)

We work our way along the ridge, stopping, looking, listening. I find a dry buffalo chip tucked under an overhanging spruce where it was shielded from the weather, and I add it to some others in my pack’s water bottle pocket in case I need to make a fire later. An hour goes by, then two hours. We see no trace of the four buffalo. They have simply vanished. When I had looked at this ridge from the opposite side of the river, I thought it ran in a straight line. Now that I’m up here, though, I see that there is a slight curve to it, facing inward toward the river. Imagine being perched on the rim of a coffee cup. You’d be able to see the interior wall of the cup curving away to both your left and your right. Though the curvature of the ridge is much less severe than a coffee cup’s rim, the effect is similar; it allows me to see a greater stretch of the slope from any given position. I tell the guys that we should sit and wait. We spread out a bit on the ridge, so we each have a different perspective on the surrounding land. I go down the slope about twenty yards and climb out onto an outcropping of rocks that gives me a little better view upstream. I get all nestled in among some boulders that will break up my outline and conceal my movements in case a buffalo appears out of the timber at close range. I take off my backpack and pull out my extra clothes and some food. I put the pack against a rock and lean against it. One time, a friend of mine was nestled among some rocks like this down in Montana while he hunted coyotes. He felt something sharp under his ass and lifted up to see a large Paleo-Indian projectile point. He wasn’t the first hunter to sit in those rocks.

I lay out my food and water to my right side and then check my rifle’s scope and barrel to make sure they’re clear of dust and debris. If water or snow gets into the barrel and freezes, it can cause the barrel to rupture when you pull the trigger. I remember that I need to put some tape over the barrel to keep it clean. I dig into my pack for my hunting kit and pull out a small roll of duct tape. I peel off a strip that’s about a half inch wide and four inches long and place half of it over the end of the barrel. The sticky part isn’t very sticky in the cold, so I rub the tape’s backing in order to heat the adhesive and get it to work better. Then I wrap the second half of the tape around the barrel’s end to hold the first half in place, the way you would bandage the tip of your finger. When a cartridge is fired, the expansion of the gases is what drives the bullet out. Some of those gases escape ahead of the bullet, and they rip the tape away before the bullet gets there.

Up the hill from me, in a mountain ash, there is a small flock of Bohemian waxwings stripping fruit from the tree. That’s the only thing moving. I pull on my hat and gloves. Either those buffalo will come out of that timber on the valley floor, or they won’t. It’s entirely up to them. I can’t see the sun through the clouds, but I can tell where it is by looking around until my eyes hurt. I track the sun across the sky until it’s close to the horizon. It takes hours. Then the sun ducks down below the clouds and lays out a nice sunset, just as smooth as if it were throwing out a picnic blanket. My fingers get cold. Then my toes get cold. I burrow into my jacket, but it doesn’t really help. I sit like that until it’s almost too dark to see my brother, just fifty yards away. The buffalo never show up.

                  9                  

W
HEN WE’RE DOZING OFF
in our tent at night, Rafferty usually announces that we’ll probably be dead in the morning from a buffalo stampede. “It’s been nice knowing you boys, all the same,” he says. At first it was only a half joke, because buffalo are known to kill people on occasion. The most vicious attack ever reported is a completely unsubstantiated tale passed down by the early-twentieth-century folklorist and historian Henry W. Shoemaker. He wrote about a giant Pennsylvania bull named Old Logan that led his herd of “brutes” into a cabin occupied by a woman and her three small children; the victims were “crushed deep into the mud of the earthen floor by the cruel hoofs.”

More truthful stories come out of Yellowstone National Park, where you’ve got more of a chance of being mauled by a buffalo than you do a bear. Between 1980 and 1999, sixty-one park visitors were injured by buffalo. That’s over twice the number injured by bears during the same time span. While Colonel Richard Irving Dodge claimed to personally know five hunters who were killed by buffalo in the Kansas Territory of the mid-nineteenth century, Yellowstone’s buffalo seem to have something against photographers. Two men, one in 1971 and the other in 1983, were killed by buffalo while closing in for snapshots. The most common buffalo-related injury in the park is a puncture wound to the legs, though a dozen or so of the victims have been thrown into the air by the swift swing of a buffalo’s head. One man turned a somersault in the air and ended up in a tree. In 1984, a sixty-three-year-old Texan named Gladys Hoffman was attacked by a buffalo in a Yellowstone campground while she posed for a photo. The animal punched one hole below her ribs and another hole into the cheek of her ass and then threw her about fifteen feet through the air. Besides her puncture wounds, she suffered fractures in her ribs, back, and wrist. She lived to sue about it.

Unfortunately, Rafferty’s not here to repeat his joke. He, Danny, and Jessen took off this morning in the raft. They got an early start, figuring that they’d make it downriver to the village of Chitina by nightfall and then back to Anchorage in time for work on Monday. When they left, Jessen assured me that he’d come back down and look for me next weekend. When the guys shoved off and the current scooted them away, Danny turned in the raft and waved back at me. “Nice knowing you,” he said.

Now I feel like I’m inside one of those horror movie trailers where the announcer warns, “There’s no one to hear you scream.” Not only that, but I have no way of getting to a place where they could hear me scream. A big, cold river separates me from any feasible route out of here. I boil water for oatmeal and coffee, and then I’m distracted when I feel something like a busted-up pack of ramen noodles inside my backpack. I stick my hand in and remember that I’ve been filling the pocket with buffalo chips. I select the two biggest remaining pieces, which are the size and thickness of my hand if I were to cut my fingers off. I place the pieces on the fire, and they’re gone within a minute. It’s like watching toilet paper burn. I walk into the willow patch and collect some larger chips that have the opposite characteristics of what I’ve just burned. These are twelve-inch disks that are dense and thick. But when I put them on the fire, they refuse to burn and instead let off a gag-inducing smoke. What the hell? I think. The Smithsonian’s William Hornaday loved a good buffalo chip fire. He was especially impressed by the buffalo’s tendency to shit in sheltered valleys and draws—just the places where man liked to camp. When pioneers were crossing the Great Plains on their way to the goldfields of California or the farmlands of Oregon, it’s said that they would cook a couple hundred meals over buffalo chip fires.
^*
If these things were such a pain, how did they manage to pull that off? Flustered, I gather up some moderately dense chips from the willow patch and prop them on twigs next to the fire. I put some rocks behind the chips to reflect heat and help them dry out.

A woman and child gather cooking fuel on the Great Plains.

As I’m messing around with the chips, a single wolf lets out a long howl toward the southwest. It’s the first howl I’ve heard so far this trip. Wolves howl for all kinds of reasons that are difficult to decipher, but a single howl from a lone wolf is usually understood to be a form of communication between the wolf and his pack. It’s like a wolf saying, “Hey, I’m over here,” or, “Where are you guys?”
^†
I’ve heard a number of lone-wolf howls before, but it occurs to me that I’ve never heard a lone-wolf howl while I was alone. This feels different, as if the wolf were teasing me.

My map shows a large network of lowlands about a half mile down the Copper River from my camp. There are braids of river channels drawn on the map, along with symbols for marshland, so I figure that the area is below the average high-water mark and therefore public land. I load up my pack and grab my rifle and start heading downstream. I pick my way over large piles of driftwood tangled on the bank. After walking for about fifteen minutes, I come to several dry stream channels coursing out of a large willow flat. I follow the largest channel away from the river. The willows and alders are thick on either side of me, so that I can’t see more than ten or twenty yards in any direction. I find a game trail that comes out of the willows and intersects the stream channel. Along with old buffalo tracks, there are prints from grizzly, fox, coyote, moose, and wolf. The wolf was going in the same direction that I am. The tracks are fresh, and I think about the wolf howl from earlier. Is this where that howl came from? No, it was more to the north. And farther off.

In the late winter, Bushpilot Dave flies over this country looking for carcasses from moose that starved or were killed by wolves over the winter. When Dave finds a carcass, he watches it for grizzly bears throughout the spring. A bear coming out of hibernation will camp out on a moose carcass for days on end. If it’s a big bear, Dave might try to land a client within the vicinity of the carcass so he can try to stalk the bear.

“You ever see bears on buffalo carcasses?” I asked him.

“No, I never have,” said Dave.

“You think the wolves around here will kill buffalo?”

“I’ve never seen any evidence of it.”

Bushpilot Dave told me about a time when he was flying up the Chetaslina valley, near the glaciers, and saw something that caught his attention. A small herd of buffalo was lying in a patch of willows while three or four wolves pranced through the middle of the group. “The bison didn’t even stand up,” said Bushpilot Dave. “They just looked at those wolves like ‘What you going to do about it?’ ”

When Europeans showed up in North America, they found wolves throughout Mexico and Canada and in every state except Hawaii. Wolves were most abundant on the Great Plains, which was home to maybe one and a half million. The wolves followed Indians, scavenging the buffalo carcasses that they left behind. When the Lewis and Clark expedition was traveling up the Missouri River in 1805, they found a hundred rotting buffalo carcasses left over in a place where Indians had made a large kill. “We saw a great many wolves in the neighborhood of these mangled carcasses,” wrote Lewis. The wolves were so overstuffed that Captain Clark walked up to one and killed it with his spontoon, a sort of walking staff tipped with a blade.

Wolves certainly did not need humans to kill buffalo for them. The wolves hunted by feeling the herd out, so to speak; they’d hang around, checking for crippled or sick animals, or calves that might be separated from the herd. It was a perfectly efficient method, especially when one considers that among a herd of five thousand or ten thousand buffalo, there’s bound to be an animal or two that’s in no condition to mount a serious defense. All in all, it’s estimated that wolves killed 33 percent of all buffalo calves annually. Maybe one million to two million buffalo died at the teeth of wolves every year.

Nowadays, wolves occur in numbers that remind me of my monthly checking account balances: Northern Michigan and Wisconsin share about 400. Minnesota has 2,500. Idaho has 200. Wyoming and Montana have about 250 wolves between them, which are generally confined to the mountainous regions dominated by federally owned wilderness areas and national parkland. Any wolf in Montana or Wyoming that strays eastward into the Plains is going to find a lack of buffalo and elk and an abundance of sheep and cattle. And as soon as it lays a tooth to a piece of livestock, it becomes fair game for government-paid predator control officers. Canada has somewhere between 52,000 and 60,000 wolves, which occupy 90 percent of their historic range in that country. (My checking account analogy stops with Canada.) The 10 percent of Canada that is missing wolves is largely that portion of the country which lies within the Great Plains—the same portion that used to have the most wolves and buffalo.

In Alaska, which has a healthy and stable population of six thousand or seven thousand wolves, the predators still occupy their entire historic range. On average, Alaskan wolves weigh eighty to ninety pounds and eat seven pounds of meat a day—that means that one wolf could eat five mature buffalo a year. If every wolf in Alaska had to rely on buffalo meat, Alaska’s entire supply would be used up in less than a month. But, as Bushpilot Dave suggested, the wolves in Alaska do not seem to target buffalo. The reason is that the wolves haven’t yet “learned” how to kill them. Wolves are educated by their pack leaders, who were educated by the pack leaders before them. The wolves in Alaska haven’t had much time to learn how to handle buffalo, which weren’t introduced to the state until the late 1920s (they didn’t show up along the Copper River until even later, in the 1950s). Biologists also believe that wolves haven’t bothered to learn how to hunt buffalo because it’s not worth their time to do so. There are only a few buffalo herds in Alaska, and those herds are smallish, with just a hundred or so animals per herd. For wolves, the value of the resource does not justify the danger and energy that would go into exploiting it. Wes Olson, a ranger at Elk Island National Park, near Edmonton, Alberta, told me that “it takes a herd of about a thousand bison to get wolves interested.” At that point, he explained, “there’s a greater chance that the herd will contain unhealthy animals, or an abundance of calves.”

The three thousand to four thousand buffalo that live in Yellowstone National Park share the land with a couple hundred wolves. Those wolves are monitored, studied, pestered, and photographed more than any other population of predators on earth, and all that attention has yielded some compelling observations about wolf-buffalo interactions. As of 2003, park biologists had documented fifty-seven predatory interactions between buffalo and wolves. Most of those interactions took place in late winter and occurred in areas marked by a scarcity of elk, which usually provide the bulk of the Yellowstone wolves’ diets.

To kill large prey, wolves usually start by biting the rear of the fleeing animal’s legs until it is “hamstrung,” or can no longer run. The biologists in Yellowstone found that the wolves would quickly lose interest in a herd of buffalo if the buffalo refused to run. Of those fifty-seven observed interactions, the wolves could only get the buffalo to run on fourteen occasions. Even then, the buffalo proved to be formidable prey, as the buffalo’s herding tendencies worked to their advantage. All those whirring, kicking, tightly interwoven hooves presented the wolves with a dangerous situation. In fourteen attempts made against herds of fleeing buffalo, the wolves made a kill only four times. On those occasions, the wolves either isolated a buffalo or else chased the herd into deep snow. On average, the battles that ended in a buffalo’s death lasted about nine hours.