American Buffalo (20 page)

As soon as the tarp is up, I clear the snow out from underneath its edges and stretch out my sleeping bag. Toward dusk the air seems to get a little warmer again; the snow is wetter and heavier than before. I wonder where those bears are now. I’ve got an old bird’s nest in my pocket and a cardboard tube that I saved from inside a used-up roll of toilet paper. I shred them up and top them with dry spruce twigs. The fire takes off, and I lean a couple of my primo buffalo chips against the burning twigs. The chips catch quickly, and I’m surprised to see them burn beautifully like coal. It’s my first good buffalo chip fire, and I feel that I’m learning something out here. I can’t say that there’s some higher power in this world that doles out justice and penance, but, at least in the wilderness, good things do seem to come to those who wait. As I slink down into my sleeping bag and watch the deeply glowing embers of my fire, I feel like I’m fulfilling my part in some sort of cosmic agreement. I’m happily waiting. And tomorrow’s going to be a big day, I just know it.

                  12                  

W
HEN I WAKE UP
, the first and only thing I see is snow. It’s all around me in the half-light of the morning, hanging from trees and carpeting the ground in an ankle-deep layer. I reach up out of my sleeping bag and smack the tarp on either side of the pole. Snow slides down in wettish clumps that fall and crumple into the perimeter of my dry patch of ground. I reach out of my bag and use my pan to scrape the snow away. The air’s cold and wet, and I pull my arm back into the warmth of the bag. This snow is the best thing that could happen. If I can cut a buffalo track in this stuff, I’ll be able to follow the animal no matter where it goes or what it does; it would have better luck losing its own tail than losing me. There’s a heavy fog in the air, the kind that doesn’t break up until the sun comes. I slide out of my sleeping bag and lace up my boots. Before making any noise or starting a fire, I creep over to the edge of the bluff to have a look around and make sure there aren’t any fresh tracks from animals that passed nearby in the night. It’s reasonable to think that buffalo hanging around in the higher elevations might be moving out, headed away from the mountains and toward the lower elevations along the Copper River. This is the first major snow of the year, a sudden reminder of what’s in store for the next six or seven months. I look toward where I saw the grizzlies last night, but the fog’s too thick to see that far.

I go back to my camp and kindle a small fire. When the fire takes, I snap a couple of leftover buffalo chips in half and stack those on along with some more twigs. I don’t think that animals readily equate smoke with humans. I put a pan of snow over the fire and then keep adding more snow as it melts. It takes about six pans mounded with snow in order to get one pan of water. As it comes to a boil, I pour two envelopes of instant oatmeal into my cup and tip in the steaming liquid. I throw a handful of coffee into the water left in the pan. When I’m done with my oatmeal, I pour the coffee into my cup while using my fingers as a sieve to keep out the grounds. I’m not sure where I’ll sleep tonight, so after gulping the coffee, I stuff my sleeping bag into my pack and roll up the tarp, careful not to make too much noise.

I haul my pack back to the edge of the bluff and crouch in the gray rising light, watching and waiting. It’s exciting to see the fog lift, as though something wonderful will be revealed. As I’m thinking about what route I should travel, I notice that the hill beneath me is so steep that I can’t see the entirety of the slope; I can see the base of the hill, and the ground beneath my feet, but I can’t see the middle portion. Something prompts me to step forward and lean out and look down.

The thing that happens next occurs in just a few seconds, but those seconds drag along in a sort of crystal clear eternity. The moment I step forward, I’m washed over by the realization that I will now have to kill a buffalo. I seem to think this before I actually see the animals, as though my thoughts are faster than my eyes. There are around twenty of them, cows and calves, emerging one by one from a small band of timber that stretches up the hillside from the valley floor. Most of the buffalo are traveling single file along a deeply cut trail, headed down the valley. Other buffalo are spread out to either side of the main line, grabbing passing bites from the prairie sagewort plants that are sticking up out of the snow. Their breath is steaming in the air, and it hangs like a cloud around them.

They have no idea that I’m here. From their perspective, only my eyes are showing above the crest of the hill. The thermal currents are wisping up the slope, into my face. I scan across the herd and pick a large, thickly furred cow, second back from the front. There are several yearling buffalo behind her, but no calves. She may be dry or may have lost her calf in the summertime. I sense a slight nervousness wash over me. There’s a year’s worth of food contained within that animal, but also a life. The seriousness of what I’m about to do feels like a great weight, but the weight has an inertia that carries itself forward. I raise my rifle, just as so many people before me have raised spears and atlatls, bows and muskets. I slip the safety forward with my thumb and lift the rifle until my eye is looking through the scope. Under magnification, the buffalo seems to be drawn closer to me. The buffalo’s side is smooth and muscled, the ribs hidden from view by a layer of fat. The shoulder moves slowly underneath the hide, like a human body stirring beneath a blanket. I position the crosshairs of the scope just below the halfway point between the buffalo’s brisket and back, about five inches behind the rear edge of the shoulder blade. I don’t want to hit anything but lung. This is how food is made. I touch the trigger. As the rifle recoils, I glimpse the buffalo’s body through the scope as it lurches downward first and then quickly upward—a lung shot. The next thing I see is a great confusion of hooves and brown hair. My buffalo tips downhill and rolls to its back. It starts sliding across the snow, slowly at first, hooves whirling in the air. It picks up speed as it goes, and almost immediately the carcass is careening downhill across the slick snow. I have this sudden sense that I’ll lose it, but it’s leaving a trail that’s as clean and wide as the path of a snowplow. The other buffalo kick and buck nervously and chase the sliding buffalo for twenty or thirty yards. I feel the ground shake. Clods of frozen dirt and snow fly in all directions. The herd swings around in one great pivoting mass and charges back toward the direction they came from. They cross the thin band of timber in a flash and veer downhill toward the valley floor. I turn back to the downed buffalo in time to see it crash into a stand of aspen trees at the base of the hill. Sticks and snow go flying every which way. The body hits the base of a dead tree and snaps it off at ground level. The trunk shoots downhill and out from under the tree. As the buffalo disappears, the body of the tree comes down with a cracking thud, aiming uphill and spitting dead limbs into the fresh snow.

And then there’s just pure quiet. My ears buzz in the stillness of it. I eject the spent shell and chamber a fresh round. With my pack on my back, I start sliding down the hill, trying to stay on my feet, but I fall to my hip and slide the rest of the way down. The path is streaked with two long runs of red blood, the thick streak from where the bullet passed into the buffalo’s side and the thinner streak from blood pouring out of its nostrils. It’s both gruesome and relieving—the gore of a clean, quick kill.

I see the giant lump of the animal before I get to the stand of trees that it crashed into. I dig my heels into the ground to slow my slide down, and the inertia of my movement puts me right back on my feet. I approach the body with my rifle in both hands, ready in case it stands back up. The buffalo is on its back, its head pointing uphill, its chin to the sky. Its legs are jutting here and there, wedged behind trees and pinned beneath logs. The large fallen tree is lying across its belly. The buffalo’s rib cage is perfectly still, with no sign of breathing. I come a little closer and jiggle its horn with my boot. Nothing. Its eye is already glassing over. Stone dead.

The hafl-skinned carcasss at the foot of “Buffalo Ridge.”

Killing a large animal inevitably gives me a sense of sorrow. I know it will hit me before it does, the way you go to bed drunk knowing you’ll be hungover in the morning. It hits as I run my fingers through the tangled mane of the buffalo’s neck. The animal feels so solid, so substantive. I feel compelled to question what I’ve done, to compare the merits of its life with the merits of my own. It’s not so much a feeling of guilt. There’s no moment when I want the buffalo to stand back up and walk away, no moment when I wish that the bullet would retreat back into the barrel. It’s more complicated than guilt. Seeing the dead buffalo, I feel an amalgamation of many things: thankfulness for the meat, an appreciation for the animal’s beauty, a regard for the history of its species, and, yes, a touch of guilt. Any one of those feelings would be a passing sensation, but together they make me feel emotionally swollen. The swelling is tender, a little bit painful. This is the curse of the human predator, I think. When a long-tailed weasel snakes its way into a rabbit’s den and devours the blind and hair-less young, it doesn’t have to think or feel a thing. Watching a weasel, you get the sense that a complete lack of morality is the only path to moral clarity.

Within minutes, my contemplation is broken by the immensity of the chore ahead of me. I walk around the buffalo’s body, and I’m surprised by how many steps it takes. It’s like circumnavigating a rowboat. One thousand or so pounds. The buffalo doesn’t care who gets its meat, wolves or birds or bacteria, but right now that decision does not belong to the buffalo. It’s up to me, and brooding over my actions isn’t going to help. The buffalo is in a horrible position for skinning and butchering. In the cold air, the carcass will lock up with rigor mortis almost immediately. I can already feel its legs tightening. It would be much better if I could get it over on one side. I grab one of the horns and try to turn the front of the buffalo, the way a rodeo cowboy twists a calf’s head to topple it. It won’t budge. The head feels like it’s fastened to the ground by a hidden section of cable. I grab the buffalo’s front leg and try to twist it free from a tree trunk. There’s no way. I take my saw and cut through the wrist-sized piece of wood. Before I can finish the cut, the tree snaps under pressure, and the carcass slumps down the hill and comes to rest against another tree. Below me is a steep pitch of large boulders. If I do cut the animal loose, it’s going to land in a worse place than here.

I lay my rifle against the carcass before getting started. I want it handy. Then I unroll my tarp and lay it across the ground so that I can empty out my pack without losing gear in the snow. First I take my small ripping knife and make a ventral incision that starts at the anus and ends at the chin. The cut is a little over seven feet long. I go just deep enough to cut through the hide, but not so deep that I puncture the abdominal lining. Beneath the cut is a layer of shiny, orange-tinted fat. When I cut up the center of the brisket, where the ribs meet, I can see the ivory color of bone. With my large skinning knife, I start to peel the hide away from the left side. I skin the left side down to the armpit on the front leg and down to the base of the back leg.

I don’t have an open pathway by which I can drag the organs clear of the body, so I want to get one of the back legs out of the way before I gut the buffalo. I straddle the rear left leg and hold it between my knees. I use my small knife to cut through the hide in a complete circle around the ankle. I start peeling the hide back, sort of like unbuttoning a shirtsleeve and rolling it up. I poke a hole between the Achilles tendon and the leg bone and slip a cord through it and tie a bowline. I throw the other end of the cord over a limb and hoist the leg so that it’s stretched out and suspended in the air.

I make an incision up the inside of the leg. The cut meets the ventral incision just about where the testicles would be on a male. It takes about twenty more minutes to skin the whole leg. When I’m done, it looks as if the buffalo has one leg in a pair of pants and the other leg out. I cut into the meat where the leg joins the torso, following the outer edge of the pelvis. The work has been bloodless so far, but I have to sever a major artery and it leaks a few ounces. The blade hits bone, and I jiggle the leg to locate the ball joint. There’s a powerful tendon at the core of the joint. I slip the tip of the knife between the ball and the socket as delicately as picking a lock; the tendon cuts with an audible pop. The leg loosens on its mooring, and I take up the slack with the rope. A few more slices and the ham drops away from the body. The hoof end is hanging from the tree, and the ball joint is resting on the toe of my boot. It’s heavy—it feels as if someone has set the leg of his chair on my toe. When I’m standing upright, the leg is just a little shorter than I am, and I’m six feet. I hug the ham around the knee and lean back to lift it off the ground. With the weight of the rope I can use my teeth to undo the knot around the Achilles tendon. I’ll let it stiffen up in the cool air before I do any more work on it.