American Buffalo

A decade ago, while he was hunting in Montana's Madison Mountains, Steven Rinella's brother kicked at an old piece of bone in the dirt, and Rinella stopped to unearth what turned out to be a buffalo skull. Brooding over its age and meaning, he began to see the buffalo everywhere: in our currency (the buffalo nickel) and the names of towns (there's a Buffalo in New York, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin, to cite just a few) and even a rock band (Buffalo Springfield). Years later, Rinella won a permit in a lottery to hunt a buffalo cow along Alaska's Copper River. And so in 2005 he set out to hunt his buffalo and, in the process, to discover for himself how and why the beast came to take on such significance in the cultural history of America. American Buffalo is the story of that quest.

The details of Rinella's hunt may define his narrative, but he cuts away frequently to bring readers up to speed on the natural history of the buffalo. That the last of North America's large Pleistocene mammals survived extinction at all is something of a miracle, given their wholesale slaughter in the late nineteenth century. About 40 million buffalo, or bison, roamed the continent during the American Revolution, but by the early twentieth century only a few hundred remained.

The irony, Rinella points out, is that it took a group of well-to-do hunting aficionados to rescue the species. During the early part of the twentieth century, Frederic Remington, Andrew Carnegie, and Theodore Roosevelt were among those who helped found the American Bison Society at the Bronx Zoo, from which 15 buffalo were shipped to the Oklahoma plains to help resuscitate the species. This small herd laid the foundation for the bison's ongoing recovery. Half a million buffalo are alive today, but most are genetically impure, having been crossbred with cattle. About 96 percent are privately owned (Ted Turner owns 45,000) by ranchers and canned-hunt operators.

Before setting off into the woods, Rinella, a correspondent for Outside magazine, uses every modern means at his disposal to better understand his prey and its place in American history. He subjects his unearthed buffalo skull to radiocarbon dating to find out when the animal may have died (somewhere in the range of 250 years ago) and uses virtual-reality software to "see" the final moments of its stampede over a buffalo jump -- a cliff over which American Indians drove great herds in scenes of almost unimaginable carnage. He is open to any tool that might bring him closer to the larger story of the animal he is soon to be bound with in the dance of predator and prey.

Continued...