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If America
has an epic tale in its 233-year history, then the decline
of the buffalo certainly ranks as one of the most American
tales of all—and one of the most heartbreaking. Outdoorsman
Steven Rinella, whose work has appeared in Outside
magazine, Field & Stream, The New Yorker, and
Men's Journal, has chronicled the natural history of
this great beast in his new book American Buffalo: In Search
of a Lost Icon.
In 1999,
on a hiking trip in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, Rinella
stumbled upon a fossilized Buffalo skull. The chance discovery
unlocked an obsession, and Rinella has spent the ten years
since on a quest to learn all he can about North America's
largest animal.
In 2005,
Rinella was one of a handful of people to win a chance to
hunt wild Buffalo in Alaska. He uses his hunting expedition
as the framework for his book. Wisely, he lets readers know
up front that he is successful in his hunt, which keeps the
book from ever being about the hunt itself. Instead, Rinella
uses incidents from his hunt as springboards to talk about
other aspects of the buffalo's natural history.
In that
regard, the book is as free-roaming as the buffalo's original
habitat—but never in a chaotic, hodgepodge way. Rinella
finds dozens of surprising and surprisingly complex avenues
to explore. He writes:
At once [the buffalo] is a symbol of the tenacity of wilderness
and the destruction of wilderness; it's a symbol of Native
American culture and the death of Native American culture;
it's a symbol of the strength and vitality of America
and the pettiness and greed of America; it represents
a frontier both forgotten and remembered; it stands for
freedom and captivity, extinction and salvation.
"For
the entirety of man's existence in North America, we've struggled
with the meaning of this animal, with the ways in which its
life is intertwined with our own," he says.
Rinella
chronicles the rise and fall of the buffalo, including its
evolution, its spread across the continent, its relationship
to the Indians, and its drive to near extinction in the late
1800s. By that point, the continent's 40 million buffalo had
been slaughtered down to only a few hundred. Today, there
are some half a million buffalo alive in North America, yet
only four percent of them roam free; the rest are fenced in,
and the majority of them belong to privately owned herds.
The story
is heartbreaking and, in many ways, one of America's great
shames. Rinella refuses to hop on the soapbox, though, and
he doesn't browbeat readers. Raising awareness about the buffalo's
history is enough, especially considering the fact that most
Americans have never even seen a wild buffalo.
But there's
plenty of fun trivia in Rinella's book, too. He talks about
the famous buffalo-head nickel and the real-life buffalo that
inspired it. He talks about the origins of the word "buffalo."
He talks about buffalo chips. "[T]here's a town or city named
Buffalo in eighteen states, though the most famous of these,
Buffalo, New York, is the only one that never had a population
of wild buffalo living in its vicinity," he says.
Rinella
explores the buffalo as icon and the buffalo as industry.
He explores myths and explodes stereotypes. "Every schoolboy
knows that the Indians used every part of the buffalo, which
is true," he writes. "But they did not use every part of every
buffalo." The Indians' relationship with the buffalo "was
complex and beautiful, not because of the Indians' unwavering
frugality with the buffalo but because of their unwavering
inventiveness with the animal."
At his
best, Rinella writes beautifully and evocatively, and he never
lets himself get bogged down in minutia. His story is crisp
and readable and fascinating. Rinella holds the buffalo in
obvious awe—which brings up an obvious question. "[H]ow
can I claim to love the very thing that I worked so hard to
kill?" he asks. The book is, after all, built around the framework
of his hunt in Alaska. "I've thought of this often lately,
yet I haven't been able to answer it with force and conviction.
For now, I rely on a response that is admittedly glib: I just
do, and I always will."
The honesty
and subtle complexity of Rinella's answer reflects the larger
relationship of man versus beast in the epic story of the
buffalo, so he can be forgiven for any appearance of hypocrisy.
In the end, it's clear where his sympathies truly lay: American
Buffalo is a heartfelt tribute to America's "lost icon."
(March,
2009)
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