American Buffalo (6 page)

In the late 1970s, Professor Robert Hudson, the director of the Alberta Veterinary Research Institute, and a team of colleagues attempted to put numbers and figures to the buffalo’s cold tolerance. They selected the six-month-old calves of four creatures: the Tibetan yak, Scottish highland cattle, Hereford cattle, and American buffalo. The researchers put the animals into airtight, insulated boxes resembling horse trailers and subjected each calf to increasingly cold temperatures. They were looking for the moment when the animals’ metabolic rate increased as a response to the cold. They monitored the animals’ breathing with a device that measures the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels going into and coming out of the box. With the input constant, changes in the output represent changes in the animals’ breathing patterns. Hereford cattle hit their critical temperature at 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The yak and the highland cattle hit theirs at –13 degrees Fahrenheit. At –22 degrees Fahrenheit, the buffalo’s metabolic rate was still
decreasing
as an energy-saving strategy. The buffalo’s critical temperature remains unknown, because no one’s gotten a box cold enough to find it.

While buffalo can tolerate the extreme cold, Mother Nature does have her ways of toppling them in great numbers. Lightning sometimes killed dozens of buffalo in a single zap, leaving their smoldering carcasses on the open ground. Near the great bend in the Arkansas River, a Sioux war party watched a tornado overtake a buffalo herd. It deposited the animals’ carcasses in a quarter-mile-long row that was stacked several buffalo deep. The Indians said that the air pressure from the tornado popped the buffalo’s eyeballs out of their sockets. Disease killed them. In the 1820s, the Sioux described a great disease that killed almost all of the buffalo in southeast Nebraska. Seven warriors were returning from a war with the Missouri River tribes, and they nearly starved while crossing this corner of the state. They found a dying bull with a swollen and rotting tongue. Six of the seven Sioux ate it, and they all died. From then on, they referred to 1825 as “When the Six Died from Eating the Whistling Buffalo.” Wildfires killed them. In 1864, a nineteen-year-old captive of the Oglala Sioux named Fanny Kelly passed through the aftermath of a prairie fire and reported so many buffalo “that had fallen victims to the embrace of the flames” that her captors’ horses had a hard time passing through the pile. Another man watched a herd of buffalo fleeing from a prairie fire near his camp and witnessed “a large number” plunge over a steep riverbank and fall hundreds of feet to get dashed on a rocky shoreline. A Canadian man traveling in North Dakota found herds of burned buffalo that were “dead and dying, blind, lame, singed and roasted.” He said the wounded were “staggering about, sometimes running afoul of a large stone, at other times tumbling down hill and falling into creeks not yet frozen over.” And they got stuck, mired in mud bogs, river bottoms, quicksand, and tar pits. In the summer of 1867, a herd of four thousand buffalo went into the mud at the confluence of the Platte River and Plum Creek, and only two thousand came out. The remaining two thousand—or around 2.5 million pounds of buffalo—joined the riverbed. South of the Platte River, along the Arkansas, an army officer named Dangerfield Parker attempted to stalk a herd of buffalo that were wading in the water. When he got close enough, he realized that the buffalo were perfectly dead. Stuck fast in the mud, the carcasses had become mummified in the dry prairie air.

It’s been estimated that accidental deaths—from fire, falling, drowning, tornadoes—claim an annual 3–9 percent of the continent’s population of wild buffalo today. If you accept that the rate of 3–9 percent was constant through time (and there’s no reason to think it wasn’t), you see that North America was once home to one to three million accidental buffalo deaths every year. At first glance that figure is hard to digest, but just look at a collection of statistics from Wood Buffalo National Park. In 1974, three thousand of the park’s buffalo, or about one-third of the total population, drowned in the Peace-Athabasca Delta. Thirteen years earlier, in 1961, roughly the same number drowned in the same place. In 1959, a thousand drowned there. In 1958, five hundred drowned there.

As the data from Wood Buffalo National Park suggests, water is the No. 1 enemy of buffalo. The substance has likely killed more buffalo than all other factors combined, including human hunting. The Spanish conquistador Coronado was perhaps the first European to witness the aftermath wrought by the mixture of American buffalo and large bodies of water. In 1540, he was traveling the American Great Plains and encountered a mound of buffalo bones piled along the leeward edge of a lake. His men estimated the mound of bones to be eighteen feet wide, as tall as two men, and about as long as a crossbow shot—maybe four hundred or five hundred yards.

While Coronado was treated to an image of cleaned and bleached bones, many other explorers witnessed sights and smells of drowned buffalo that were much less appetizing. In May 1795, the fur trader John McDonnell descended the Qu’Appelle River and spent a day counting dead buffalo that were either floating in the river or mired along the banks. By the time he made camp for the night, his count had reached 7,360. In several places, McDonnell got out and walked across the carcasses and remarked that the animals were stacked three to five deep. John Bradbury, a Scottish-born botanist who traveled the Missouri River in 1811, spotted his first drowned buffalo on April 2 when he was 240 miles upstream from St. Louis.
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Two weeks later, writes Bradbury, “we began to notice more particularly the great number of drowned buffaloes that were floating on the river; vast numbers of them were also thrown ashore, and upon the rafts, on the points of the islands.” In 1829, a man named Sir George Simpson saw “as many as 10,000 of their putrid carcasses lying mired in a single ford of the Saskatchewan, and contaminating the air for many miles around.” The German explorer and ethnologist Prince Maximilian traveled up the Missouri River in the early 1830s. He wrote of how “whole herds were often drowned in the Missouri” and described places where eighteen hundred or more dead buffalo were collected in some of the sloughs of the river. Along the Red River, another traveler noted that “drowned buffalo continue to drift by in whole herds throughout the month, and toward the end for two days and nights their dead bodies formed one continuous line in the current.” He watched thousands come to rest against the banks. It smelled so bad that he refused to eat his dinner, and he wondered if he was witnessing a rare tragedy. When he put the question to his Indian guides, they told him that every spring was “about the same.”

All of these drowned buffalo carcasses had dramatic effects on the ecology of large rivers. Along the Missouri River, the annual “runs” of dead buffalo were an important part of the environmental cycle. People passing near Great Falls, Montana, reported congregations of grizzly bears gathered there in the spring to feed on drowned buffalo that came over the falls and got bashed against the rocks.
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John Bradbury described how the carcasses on the Missouri “attracted an immense number of turkey buzzards.” Prince Maximilian reported that many of the river’s islands were formed by the collection of silt against rafts of drowned buffalo. Other explorers watched living buffalo cross the river on mushy bridges made from the bodies of drowned buffalo. Still others claimed to see the entire river dammed by accumulations of beached carcasses.

“
HARD LEFT
,” Rafferty yells. “Left, left, left. Go, paddle.” We’ve been floating down the river for seven hours, and we’ve just rounded a bend to see the mouth of the Dadina River go shooting past. It flows into the Copper through a broad, shallow channel of water that you could cross in three running jumps. Doing so would cause you to bust your ass, because the river rocks here are as slippery as vegetable oil. I jump from the raft with the bowline in my hand; the raft hits the bank like a bumper car and bounces away. I put the line in a double wrap around the trunk of a dead cottonwood and use the friction to slow the raft. The force of the current nearly uproots the small tree. Danny and Jessen jump to the bank and drag over a large drift log. We run two lines from the log to the boat, one fore and one aft, and then mound the log with four hundred or five hundred pounds of rock. The raft isn’t going anywhere. We load enough gear in our packs to get us through a couple days, some extra clothes, food, skinning knives, a tarp. Then we start heading up the tributary.

Flying over the backcountry in a bush plane messes with your mind. You’re going about eighty or ninety miles per hour at an elevation of a thousand feet, and the ground crawls along beneath you. The land looks relatively flat, the brush low and thin, landmarks close together. It feels as if you could walk faster than you’re moving, as though you’d cross the ground like a greased hog. Reality hits when you hit the ground. You see that the waist-high brush really reaches ten feet over your head. Land that looked as flat as a pool table is actually marked by steep hills and crevices so deep that you can’t tell where you’re going or where you’ve been. Bodies of water that appeared to have shorelines as solid as golf course water hazards turn out to be open pockets of water amid vast expanses of boot-sucking muck.

Those are the conditions we run into as we try to move up the banks of the river. The alder is of mind-boggling thickness. Alder is a shrub-like tree belonging to the birch family, though it plays the role of the birch tree’s evil bastard cousin. The trunk of an alder, about as thick as a professional wrestler’s forearm, rises out of the ground just a little higher than a person can raise his leg and then branches out in multiple, twisted, horizontal angles. Going through it makes every ten feet of progress feel like breaking out of a maximum-security jail. Some limbs shoot out over the water, so we can’t walk in the shallow edges of the river; other limbs are shooting back into the woods, so we can’t walk on the immediate banks. Despite Rafferty’s advice that “you have to love the alders, be one with them,” I hate the alders.

There are two ways for us to get out of the alders, the first being hazardous and the second being illegal. The hazardous option involves climbing into the middle of the Dadina River and wading upstream. The river is waist high and moving fast, and the rocks on the bottom are slick as snot. Even if we aren’t bowled over by the current, our gear will get soaked. The illegal option involves striking off into the timber away from the immediate edge of the river, which would put us on land owned by Ahtna. Not that anyone would ever know we’re here. Even if you buzzed directly overhead in a bush plane, you’d have a hell of a time seeing us down in this alder-choked hellhole. But our concerns are beyond the simple fact of getting upstream, because that isn’t even half the problem.

In fact, that’s not even one-tenth of the problem. The four of us are moving upstream with maybe a hundred pounds of gear between us, but if we killed a buffalo up here, we’d be walking out with hundreds of pounds of meat, hide, femurs, fat, and skull. That can’t be done in one trip. Even if we really loaded our packs to backbreaking capacity on each trip, with maybe a hundred pounds apiece, we’d be going back and forth to the raft three times.

There’s a fine line between being practical and being a candyass, which is a word that my father used to describe someone whom he considered to be the opposite of tough. When I’m in the woods and I run into a situation that seems like a bad idea, whether it’s climbing up a steep icy mountainside or taking a canoe through a nasty stretch of rapids, I always ask myself which of these two words, “practical” or “candyass,” best defines my decision making. Sometimes, it’s a difficult determination to make. Because I’m very afraid of becoming a candyass, I’ll sometimes do things that I know to be impractical just so I don’t have to worry about being a candyass. I guess that’s why we’re still struggling up the Dadina an hour after getting started. We haven’t gone a half mile, and dusk will be coming soon. I turn to Danny, who’s fighting the alders like they’re a pack of extraterrestrial dryland octopuses.

“This is ridiculous. I just don’t think we could pack an animal out of here. I mean, I suppose we
could . . .
but give me a break.” Danny looks at me and then turns his head back and forth to survey the tangle of vegetation. He looks down into the current of the Dadina. Without saying anything, he gestures back toward the way we came and turns around.

Grizzly tracks at the mouth of the Dadina River.

When the four of us get back to the raft, we’ve only got an hour of daylight left. We pick a good spot to camp on a dry gravel bar just below our raft. Grizzly bear tracks are all over in the mud, especially along the shallow channel of water separating our gravel bar from the river’s main stem. The channel is littered with the partially decomposed carcasses of sockeye salmon. I prod a carcass with the toe of my boot, and Danny gives me a look that says, “You jackass.” He’s right about that. Within minutes the entire area stinks like rotten fish.