American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon »

STEVEN RINELLA is the author of The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine and a correspondent for Outside magazine. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, American Heritage, the New York Times, Field & Stream, Men’s Journal, and Salon.com. He grew up in Twin Lake, Michigan, and now tries to split his time between Alaska and Brooklyn, New York.

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.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Instead of Coke, hot dogs, or apple pie, Steven Rinella contends that the authentic all-American food is buffalo. In his investigation of our continent's largest land animal, he explores its contradictory representation of "freedom and captivity, extinction and salvation." He both tracks the 40,000-year history of American bison and offers an extraordinary firsthand account. In 2005, Rinella was granted one of 24 Alaskan hunting permits for the Copper River buffalo herd. Author of The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine, he has written extensively about his experiences as a gamesman, but the magnitude of this hunt leads him on a quest far greater than his half-ton prey. His enthusiasm and conversational tone bring to life a subject that has largely fallen off the radar of popular imagination. Ted Turner owns more buffalo than live in the wild, and much of the romance of pursuing them disappeared with the advent of "hunting" buffalo in captivity. By interweaving his tale with the animal's history, Rinella has crafted an astonishing and intelligent narrative. Though his exhaustive research (and pursuit) may strike some as exhausting, it succeeds in framing one man's hunt in a broader, relevant context. There's no doubt that Rinella can be funny -- and sometimes crass -- but after he finally kills a buffalo, it's his musings on guilt as "the curse of the human predator" that leave a permanent trace. --Sarah Norris