American Buffalo (21 page)

At the base of the ventral incision, right where a human’s belly button would be, I poke a small hole through the abdominal lining. I do this with the blade pointing upward, so it doesn’t go through and puncture the vegetation-filled stomach. Once I’m through, I can peek in there and see the purplish coils of intestines. I slip my middle and index fingers inside the incision and lift up, pulling the abdominal lining away from the body and creating air space between the thin layer of muscle and the organs. Slipping the knife blade between my fingers, I run the incision all the way to the brisket. The sharp bright purple edge of the liver is wrapped around the dull gray stomach like a hand. With the incoming gush of cold air, the large and small intestines contract and curl like stirred-up snakes. The diaphragm is holding back a few quarts of blood that spilled from the lungs.

Plains Indian tribes used to eat more raw meat than Indians in the eastern United States. They’d be digging in right now. They liked raw liver, warm and fresh from the carcass. They liked the juice squeezed from the bile sac. They liked raw kidney. They liked the warm, shiny fat around the intestines. They liked the coagulated slugs of blood in the ventricles of the heart. They would slice into the mammary glands of lactating females and lap the milk that dripped out. When they killed young calves, they would drink out the curdled mother’s milk. While I’ve tried a few of these tricks over the years, my curiosity has been sated. I’ll wait until I get a fire going.

I’ve never wasted my time arguing with vegetarians who are opposed to hunting. They’re obviously serious about their convictions, and I respect their beliefs. On the other hand, I used to be endlessly troubled by meat-eating people who were uneasy with hunters and hunting. The glaring hypocrisy of their stance made me almost blind with rage. How can someone suggest that paying for the slaughter of animals is more justifiable than taking the responsibility for one’s food into one’s own hands? At moments like this, though, I understand their perspective much better. It takes a strong stomach and a lot of dedication to do this job properly. You need to be able to visualize the end result—high-quality food—at a time when your sensory perceptions are seeing everything but that. Civilization is a mechanism that allows us to avoid the necessary but ugly aspects of life; most of us do not euthanize our own pets, we don’t unplug the life support on our own ailing grandparents, we don’t repair our own cars, and we don’t process our own raw sewage. Instead, the delegation of our less-pleasant responsibilities is so widespread that taking these things on is almost like trying to swim upriver. It’s easier
not
to do them, and those who insist on doing so are bound to look a little odd.

I’m thinking about this as I get ready for the next step. I slice through the flesh that lies over the pelvis until I’ve exposed the fused, cartilaginous joint where the left and right sides join together. (If you press your hand firmly against your lower stomach, below your navel, and move your hand downward toward your crotch, that’s the bone you feel.) Then I reach deep inside the buffalo, putting my arm inside the gutting incision and following the abdominal wall with my hand all the way back until I’m inside the pelvis. I can’t see, but I can feel what I’m doing. I locate the bladder and the colon and pull them away from the pelvis while pressing down. I want them out of the way so that I can saw through the pelvis without cutting into them and spilling their contents on the meat. I spend the next few minutes with one arm up to the bicep in the buffalo’s body and my other arm working the saw. Archaeological evidence suggests that Folsom hunters simply shattered the pelvis with a big rock.

I cut through the pelvis twice, once on each side. The bone lifts right out. I can reach in there and detach the connective tissues holding the colon in place. I cut a complete circle around the anus and sex organs, so that they are connected to the colon rather than the hide. Then I take my bone saw and cut through the sternum. The meat over the bones is heavy and coarse; already it looks like its most delicious final product, pastrami.

Opening the rib cage allows a fresh gust of cold air into the chest cavity. Steam pours out. I use my small knife to cut the diaphragm all the way to the inside middle of the back. The blood from the ruptured lungs pours out of the chest cavity and floods through the canal that I opened by removing the anal tract. Next I sever the aorta, esophagus, and windpipe inside the chest cavity, right at the base of the neck. The internal organs are lying loose inside the buffalo like soup in a bowl. I make a slit in the pericardium, and I pluck out the buffalo’s heart. It’s the size of a cantaloupe. Now, grabbing two firm handfuls of the guts, I pull with all my might. I have to bounce my weight against the resistance, until the whole package starts to peel free. I readjust my grip, wrapping a hand around the stomach, and soon everything comes slipping backward through the open path that I cleared by removing the leg. I guide the bladder and colon around the sharp edges of the split pelvis, and with one last yank the buffalo is completely gutted. Over one hundred pounds of offal are lying at my feet. My hands steam when I wipe them with snow.

I used to cut firewood for money when I was in college, and I tweaked my lower back. It hurts when I have to bend over for extended periods of time. The rough ground and slippery snow don’t help. I stand and stretch, and while I’m up, I take a careful look around. The wind has switched again; it’s now blowing downhill toward the Chetaslina. I concentrate on the dark swath of timber in that direction, because that’s the way that trouble will come from. I know for a fact that there’s at least a pair of grizzly bears in the area. Last night, they were less than a mile from me. Now I’m even closer to where they were. With these guts out and the smell blowing around, I’ll be surprised if they don’t find out about this. They were not big—they looked to be under four hundred pounds apiece, a pair of subadult siblings, which makes them even scarier. They’re young and dumb, and probably desperate. It’s mid-October, the salmon runs have petered out, and they should be going down for hibernation soon. The fact that they haven’t means they’re hungry, and the fact that they’re hungry is what makes me edgy.

Grizzlies can handily kill buffalo calves, but they encounter serious problems when they try to attack adults. First off, there’s the matter of speed. A grizzly can hit top speeds of over forty miles per hour, which is faster than a buffalo, but they can’t sustain that speed long enough to wear a buffalo down. Another issue is a buffalo’s horns. Grizzlies are not as agile and wiry as wolves, and it seems as though they can’t effectively avoid a buffalo’s defense mechanism. There’s a documented case from Yellowstone in which a buffalo managed to kill a sow grizzly by punching a pair of holes through its belly and busting every rib in its side.

This hardly keeps grizzlies from getting buffalo meat, because they make much better thieves than killers. In one study, researchers found that grizzly bears kill only 5 percent of the meat that they consume. They get the remaining 95 percent from carrion. In Yellowstone National Park, rangers once recorded the visits of twenty-three separate grizzlies to one dead buffalo. That should not, however, be taken as a suggestion that they prefer rancid carcasses. Grizzlies will spend days following in the wakes of hunting wolf packs. In 2000, in the Lamar valley of Yellowstone National Park, a grizzly bear trailed a pack of wolves so closely that it was able to steal a buffalo calf from them before they finished killing it. When a grizzly gets its paws on a large animal, it will usually rip open the belly and eat the liver first. Grizzlies also like lungs and other organ meats. It’s probably because they can force down a lot of soft tissue in a hurry; they want to maximize their caloric intake before a bigger bear comes along and steals what they stole.

Knowing that the guts will be of primary interest to the bears, I decide to haul them in a downwind direction. That way a bear that is following the odor will hit the guts before he hits me. I pull out the liver for my own use and set it on a log. At first I think I’ll drag the whole pile a couple hundred yards through the trees, but once I get started, I can see that this isn’t going to happen. I can barely budge it, even with the help of the slippery snow. I could lighten the load by cutting the stomach free, but I don’t want to spill everything out and create even more odor. I break into a sweat after tugging the guts only about fifty yards. I give it a few more yanks and then snag the stomach on a sharp stick. It rips open and out spills a load of food that looks almost exactly like a bag of lawn-mower trimmings. That’ll have to be far enough. I look up the hill at my rifle, next to the carcass, and think that I should have taken it with me.

My absence from the buffalo is an invitation to the six or seven gray jays that have been gathering in the treetops. They’re about the size of robins, with much stronger beaks and more curiosity. They have this way of cocking their heads back and forth while assessing the safety of a situation. It makes them seem like something out of a Disney cartoon. Old-timers call them camp robbers. They like to hang around any kind of activity involving predators—bears, humans, foxes—figuring that food is bound to make an appearance. They smell meat from great distances above the ground, probably as the odor wafts on the upward air currents. If there’s blood on the snow, they find it even faster, as red only means one thing in the wilderness. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that jays automatically cue in on rifle shots in heavily hunted areas. I don’t want them shitting all over the meat as they peck at the buffalo, so I start a little gray jay bait pile about thirty yards off to the side. As long as they can eat something, they’ll stay over there and leave me alone. I give them a few wads of kidney fat, because I like the way they wipe their beaks on twigs after eating it. They do this with a quick, back-and-forth action that reminds me of sharpening a knife.

The carcass is significantly lighter now, and I can rock it back and forth. It’s still ungainly enough that it might slide and roll into an unworkable position, so I kick a few boulders free from the ground and position them to form a retaining wall. I also manage to twist the head around and jab a horn into the ground so that it’s acting as a support on the downhill side. Sitting against a tree, I place my feet on the buffalo’s ribs and heave against it with my feet. It slowly tips. I rock it a few more times, giving more pressure each time, and then it rolls. The side I’ve been working on—the side where I removed the back ham—is facing toward the sky.

The front shoulder will come off easier than the back. There’s no ball joint to deal with. I cut the hide around the ankle, just below the shank, and then saw it off with my bone saw. Then I take my ripping knife and make a cut up the inside of the leg. I start at the ankle, go just behind the armpit, and meet up with the ventral incision. The hide peels off the leg quickly, and severing it from the body is almost effortless. With my back arched and the weight resting on my belly, I waddle over to a tree and lean the shoulder against the trunk.

I’m ready for a lunch break, but first I take my skinning knife and work the hide back to the backbone on the upward-facing side. There’s some bright orange fat encasing the loins along the spine. I cut some of the fat away for cooking and then pull the hide back into place like I’m tucking the buffalo in for the night. That will help keep it from freezing too solid overnight, and also keep the birds off. I’ve got half of the legs removed and half of the carcass skinned. Seems like a good place to stop.

There’s a wad of game bags stuffed into the bottom of my pack. The bags are made of stretchy, breathable material that is almost unrippable. It’s as thin as cheesecloth; you could cover your whole body with the amount that you could fit in your mouth. I work a bag around the buffalo’s shoulder. The bag will keep the leg from getting dirty, and it makes it easier to grip. I tip the leg over in the snow and then slide it into my backpack, shoulder first with the ankle sticking out. Only a little more than half fits into the backpack, but at least it’s the heavy end. I tie my sleeping bag to the outside of the pack and load up a few more things that I’ll need for the night. I roll the rest of my gear into my food bag and then wedge the package into the limbs of a small spruce tree. I wish there were some trees big enough to hang the buffalo’s meat out of a bear’s reach, but there’s nothing nearly thick enough.

It’s going to be dark in a couple of hours. I sit down next to my pack in order to wiggle into the shoulder straps. Once the pack is on, I struggle to my knees. From there I can stand up and lift the weight of the leg, which is severely off balance. I figure that the pack weighs a bit less than one hundred pounds. I get a compass reading, shoulder my rifle, and then start toward the Chetaslina. It’s about one mile away. I’ve got my bone saw in my hand because I’ll need to clear a trail through the brush. It will take me probably seven trips like this to get the meat down to the Chetaslina. From there it’s still three miles to my main camp along the Copper. I’m not sure how I’ll get the meat down that far. I’ll figure that out later.

When I get away from the carcass, I start to think that I’m being paranoid about the grizzlies. They were headed upriver, away from here. Plus, the carcass is brand-new. What are the chances they’ll find it before I get it to my base camp? And besides that, I lit a fire and spent the whole day there, spreading around plenty of human odor. I tell myself that I’ve probably got a couple days before I run into any trouble. I continue along, hacking my way through the brush. I beat a trail over logs and under logs, through thickets and around them. If I keep tromping through the same place, I’ll eventually work up a good trail. I use my knife to shave thin strips of bark from the sides of trees to mark my path in case the snow melts. In places it’s impossible to proceed, and I have to back out and try a new route. When this happens, I put a scratch across the bark peelings so that I don’t get confused in the dark.