SS&S Book Club: American Buffalo

Scene: you’re completely alone, a few miles above a remote Alaskan river, and you’ve just shot a bison. Your hunting partners had to leave for the week to go to their jobs, and are returning with the raft the following weekend to pick you up. It’s just you, several miles away from the rendezvous point, standing over 1000 kg of dead bison. And just to make things interesting, there are grizzly tracks everywhere. What now?

And that’s the cold open to Steve Rinella’s American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon. It’s a fantastic read – a piece of narrative non-fiction, in which he traces two linked stories: that of his own bison hunt on Alaska’s Copper River, intertwined with the history of bison in North America. In addition to the story of the hunt itself, Rinella recounts his personal history of just how he came to be standing over that dead bison in the first place, starting with his chance discovery of a centuries-old bison skull on top of a Montana mountain range. His travels take him all across North America, covering topics including the evolutionary history and biogeography of bison, their relationship with first humans to inhabit North America following the last ice age, all the way through to their near-extinction in the late 1800s and subsequent recovery efforts.

The hunt itself is a once-in-a-lifetime lottery tag for a herd of introduced animals on the Copper River; the herd was introduced decades ago, and recently has been able to support a limited hunt. These parts of the book are probably what you’d imagine – a play-by-play of finding a hunting spot, the logistics of actually getting in there by raft and on foot, searching for the herd, and disassembling and packing out a giant carcass, all of which is interspersed with troubleshooting private land permissions, avoiding grizzly bears, bad weather, and the impending winter freeze-up. Amplifying all of this is the remoteness of the location, along with the sheer size of the beast itself. Even if the subject matter is what you’d expect from a hunting story, the pacing and writing keep it riveting. He also provides enough geographic detail that I was able to get my nerd on and roughly follow his route on Google Earth.

It’s not a perfect book; towards the end, I found the historical parts to drag a bit – “In the year X, in place Y, Z happened.” But a handful of pages that read like a dry high school history text book are greatly outweighed by the rest of the book. Biology, conservation, history, adventure, all rolled up into a brisk, well-written package. I’ll give it an A-.

***

I haven’t posted a thing since last fall, so even though I currently have no dead animals to report, I felt the need to write up something. I’ve been following Steve Rinella’s work a lot lately. If you don’t follow his stuff, he’s got a hunting show and podcast, both called Meateater, along with several books. The show is probably more reflective than your typical hunting show (well, as reflective as you can be with a 21-minute time limit). It’s as much an outdoor-adventure/nature show as it is a hunting show - half of the time he doesn’t actually shoot anything. And he goes on some pretty rad hunts in incredible country: goats, sheep, elk, moose, bear, ducks, turkey, you name it. Oh, and for all you UFC fans out there, he brings Joe Rogan on a bunch of his hunts, including getting him his first deer.

The podcast can be a bit hit-and-miss; sometimes it’s just a bunch of guys shooting the shit, which can be pretty rambling and often not great. Other episodes are more focussed, and I’ve found those to be the better ones. A couple that stand out for me are one on hunting optics where they talk to a guy from Vortex, and one where he interviews an environmental historian on the philosophy, politics, and history of hunting. All in all, I think his work is worth checking out – maybe start with a podcast episode or two, and go from there if you like what you hear.

So, what else should I put on my reading list?