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.

Alone on his hunt, in a land of icy rivers, sudden snowfalls, and thick forests of alder and spruce, Rinella doggedly pursues any sign of buffalo, aware that although he's engaging in an activity that has gone on for many thousands of years, the modern hunt, enhanced by tools such as rifles and scopes, is not quite the same. At last, after several days toughing it out in the wilderness, he comes upon a small herd of 20, making their way downriver, grazing on prairie sagewort. His shot is true; he has his buffalo.

As he stands over its stiffening carcass, he finds himself awash in ambiguity. "I'd like to make a balloon with the bladder and let it float in the river," he writes. "I'm also curious what it would look like if I painted my face with buffalo fat that's been dyed black with the ash from buffalo chips. In a way, though, doing those things seems like a form of cultural hijacking. I could learn what it feels like to have my face smeared with buffalo fat, but that wouldn't tell me what it's like to believe that I was harnessing the power of the buffalo. And without feeling both of those things, I imagine that it's difficult to properly feel either one of them."

This sort of reckoning with the moral complexities of his hunt elevates Rinella's narrative above the bait-and-bullet, kill-and-tell school of outdoor writing. Rinella has studied his subject so intently that he can name every part of the animal and knows precisely how it was used by native people. He has deftly woven the history and cultural significance of the buffalo into a tale of adventure that is both lively and crisp, and yet in the end, despite his best efforts, he finds himself cut off from the sort of intimacy with the buffalo that can come only from relying on it for an entire way of life.