American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon
by Steven Rinella
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Book Summary Information
Author: Steven RinellaEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2008-12-02
ISBN: 0385521685
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Book Reviews of American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon
Book Review: The Quixotic Adventures of a Buffalo Boy
Summary: 5 Stars
Round about 1975, on an isthmus between two unmapped but named branches of a cold-flowing river in the Maine wilderness, John McPhee, a writer; Henri Vaillancourt, a canoe maker and two friends, chanced upon what still bears our astonishment: "Just before the shore of Eagle, we drop our packs, set down the canoes and stare in disbelief at what may be the most incongruous sight any of us have ever seen: two full-scale steam locomotives in the woods, abandoned."
They sustained their voyages through that Northern territory following Henry David Thoreau, who sauntered and paddled there before them, in 1846, 1853 and 1857, and wrote about his own quixotic adventures in another of his fabulous and largely ignored volumes, THE MAINE WOODS. Here is Thoreau, reaching the summit of Mount Ktaadn, slipping the traps and trivialities of his companions, but not yet sighting upon the exhilarating freedom for which he tells us his Concord meditations beforehand had prepared him:
At length I entered within the skirts of the
cloud which seemed forever drifting over
the summit, and yet would never be gone,
but was generated out of that pure air as
fast as it flowed away; and when,a
quarter of a mile farther, I reached the
summit of the ridge... I was deep within
the hostile ranks of clouds....
It was vast, Titanic, and such as man
never inhabits. Some part of the beholder,
even some vital part, seems to escape
through the loose grating of his ribs as he
ascends.
Titanic, Thoreau calls it, both the bulk of it and its elemental, inimical Force. In a different tenure Thoreau would write: The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild, and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. What else he learned in Maine was on what uneasy terms men, a man, inhabits that Wild.
Spellbinding tellers-of-tales narrate lost memories of the Wild, the hunt and Original People, preserving and furthering the idea of freedom. This above all else. This inchoate urge propelling Eve and Adam from the African Motherland, breathing life into millennia of eastward migrations, pushing Siberian tribes across rolling Beringian hills and down through the ice corridor to grow strong and tall hunting the brown hordes. Let the buffalo roam.
Steven Rinella is a brazen new voice in this ancient tradition. Here is a writer who has never seen a wilderness he doesn't want to play in, who can never enter the woods without discovering the literal sense of it:
I've often found elk like this, just by
smelling them. I can usually tell the
difference between the smell of elk
that are there and the smell of elk
that used to be there. This odor
now has a strange touch of warmth
to it, like they are either here or
have just left.
He has a fond connoisseurship for buffalo poop:
The perfect specimen has the
circumference of a baseball cap,
with folded layers like a sheik's turban.
It's as dense as a gingersnap
cookie,with the texture of old
cardboard that's been wet and
dried out again.
And like Thoreau, he writes well of clouds:
Earlier, the cloud cover was high
and loosely packed, but it seems
to have grown thick and dense. The
clouds come to an abrupt end toward
the northern horizon. As I watch them,
something rather surreal happens; the
sky to the north becomes completely
clear, and for the briefest moment,
just seconds, I can see the entire
southern exposure of the mountain
peaks.... They stand like enormous
paper weights whose job it is to anchor
the world in place.
Early in the book, Rinella recounts a recurring nightmare: groping in a cold, murky place for a trapped muskrat, he finds instead a human corpse. The Alaskan wilderness through which he fights his way after winning a buffalo tag in the state lottery holds death as easily as any place on earth and metes it out to the lucky and luckless alike. There are such an astonishing number of ways that buffalo find to die that it is a miracle, he tells us, that they have survived at all.
Mired in mud bogs, river bottoms, quicksand and tar pits; run over cliffs, taken by torrents, they die, in the millions, by drowning. Tornadoes explode them, lightening electrocutes them, prairie fires incinerate them; now as then, 9% of buffalo deaths come through nature's unlicensed caprices. But there is no argument that it was us, mountain men, professional hunters, brigands, killers for "sport", pioneers, railroad thugs who hunted them nearly to extinction.
The buffalo's harrowing story - they are now steadily growing in numbers to about 500,000 - is comedic in the Aristotelian sense and forms the stern moral backdrop of Rinella's saga. But it is the telling of his own buffalo hunt which carries the day, and the reader.
Alone in a wilderness is a different kind of alone, and when Rinella at last finds the animals he has been tracking for days, he is alone, his friends having returned to jobs and obligations, alone with his friends' farewell - "Nice knowing you." By the time they reunite with him, he has made his kill, and is trying to move 1000 pounds of meat, bone and fur down a treacherous, ice-bound river. Nearing his own end, as if the portent of his dream has structured it, he is plucked from the killing water by the strong arm of Hardcore Jeffy. Hypothermia had set in. I reckon he would have been dead before another human hand touched him.
The last page of Steven Rinella's book is coda to his wonderful composition. It is as beautiful a piece of writing as you are likely to find. It's about freedom, freedom and renewal.
Let the buffalo roam.
Summary of American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon
From the host of the Travel Channel?s ?The Wild Within.?A hunt for the American buffalo?an adventurous, fascinating examination of an animal that has haunted the American imagination.
In 2005, Steven Rinella won a lottery permit to hunt for a wild buffalo, or American bison, in the Alaskan wilderness. Despite the odds?there?s only a 2 percent chance of drawing the permit, and fewer than 20 percent of those hunters are successful?Rinella managed to kill a buffalo on a snow-covered mountainside and then raft the meat back to civilization while being trailed by grizzly bears and suffering from hypothermia. Throughout these adventures, Rinella found himself contemplating his own place among the 14,000 years? worth of buffalo hunters in North America, as well as the buffalo?s place in the American experience. At the time of the Revolutionary War, North America was home to approximately 40 million buffalo, the largest herd of big mammals on the planet, but by the mid-1890s only a few hundred remained. Now that the buffalo is on the verge of a dramatic ecological recovery across the West, Americans are faced with the challenge of how, and if, we can dare to share our land with a beast that is the embodiment of the American wilderness.
American Buffalo is a narrative tale of Rinella?s hunt. But beyond that, it is the story of the many ways in which the buffalo has shaped our national identity. Rinella takes us across the continent in search of the buffalo?s past, present, and future: to the Bering Land Bridge, where scientists search for buffalo bones amid artifacts of the New World?s earliest human inhabitants; to buffalo jumps where Native Americans once ran buffalo over cliffs by the thousands; to the Detroit Carbon works, a ?bone charcoal? plant that made fortunes in the late 1800s by turning millions of tons of buffalo bones into bone meal, black dye, and fine china; and even to an abattoir turned fashion mecca in Manhattan?s Meatpacking District, where a depressed buffalo named Black Diamond met his fate after serving as the model for the American nickel.
Rinella?s erudition and exuberance, combined with his gift for storytelling, make him the perfect guide for a book that combines outdoor adventure with a quirky blend of facts and observations about history, biology, and the natural world. Both a captivating narrative and a book of environmental and historical significance, American Buffalo tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos.
Amazon Best of the Month, December 2008: Before the 18th century, the American buffalo was the largest land mammal in North America, largely predator-free and roaming the continent in numbers estimated in excess of 40 million. In just over a century, widespread slaughter reduced the population to a few hundred head, and the American West lay beneath a till of bleached bones. When Steven Rinella stumbled over a buffalo skull in Yellowstone National Park, it sparked an obsessive search for the beast's past, from its migration across the Bering land bridge to its near extinction at the hands of western settlers. American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon is his fascinating chronicle, beginning with a search for Black Diamond (the doomed model for the Buffalo Nickel) and including an exploration of "buffalo jumps" (where thousands were run over cliffs by Native American hunters), and tales of bone piles--harvested from the plains for a thriving fertilizer industry--stacked 10 feet high, 20 feet wide, and a half-mile long. Rinella's history is deftly interwoven with his own literal buffalo hunt in Alaska's Wrangell mountains, complete with grizzly bears, raging, ice-rimmed rivers, and bouts of hypothermia and frostbite. Written in a spare style appropriate to the rigors of the frozen wilderness, American Buffalo is engrossing, informative, funny, and a welcome achievement of both natural history and outdoor adventure. --Jon Foro
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