American Buffalo Read Online Free PDF

Fairbanks and arrived on June 27, 1928. After a short stopover, the buffalo were loaded on trucks and driven a hundred miles to the southeast and let loose near their final destination, which is now the town of Delta Junction. Because Alaska was still thirty-one years away from statehood, the animals fell under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The government wanted to protect the buffalo herd until it was large enough to withstand a limited amount of hunting by humans. The plan worked: by 1940 Alaska had become home to upwards of five hundred descendants of Sam Walking Coyote’s buffalo.
    It’s hard to say what might have happened to the buffalo herd if it had been allowed to expand without any constraints on its habitat, but in many ways World War II sealed the herd’s fate. The U.S. Army was looking to supply its Russian allies with a northern route that was safe from German and Japanese aerial assault. It established the Big Delta Army Air Field and started building highways to connect it to the Lower 48. People started moving in. After World War II, the airbase used to supply Russia became a key strategic point in our emerging national defense plan against Russia.
    The buffalo herd’s habitat was being invaded by people. The animals destroyed the army’s landscaping. Large bulls, gone crazy with the hormones of breeding season, charged trucks. By 1950 the government was looking to get rid of some of the buffalo, and this time to a place where they wouldn’t cause any future hassles. That summer, employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rounded up seventeen buffalo from Delta Junction and herded them into a sturdy corral. They loaded the buffalo into trucks and drove them about 170 miles to the southeast, near the town of Slana, and then hauled them up the Nabesna Road.
    On contemporary maps, the Nabesna Road is a dotted line next to the words “Closed in winter.” It leads into Wrangell–St. Elias, and the National Park Service describes it as “short on services but big on wilderness.” Somewhere along the road—no one knows exactly where—the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees released the buffalo. For the next ten years, the fate of the Nabesna Road herd was unknown. Reports of lone, wandering buffalo trickled in from various points across hundreds of square miles. There were rumors that the buffalo had been killed off by wolves and grizzlies. Some people thought that disease had killed them all. Eventually, though, the reported whereabouts of the buffalo herd started to focus in on a particular tract of wilderness about 130 miles downriver from the release site at Slana, or about fifteen hundred miles from where Sam Walking Coyote had originally picked up their ancestors.
    This tract of land is now beneath Bushpilot Dave and me as we fly along in his Super Cub. I have a map of the area spread across my lap, along with a legal description of the hunt area. The area has a name, DI454, which comprises nine hundred square miles, or over a half-million acres. It’s described in terms of physical landmarks. I read the description to Bushpilot Dave: “East of the Copper River, south of the Nadina River, Nadina Glacier and Sanford Glacier, and west of the line from Mount Sanford to Mount Wrangell to Long Glacier, and west of the Kotsina River, and that portion of Unit 13D east of the Edgerton Highway.”
    When I get done reading, Bushpilot Dave taps the left window and points to a canyon that slices through the forested expanse beneath us. “That’s the Nadina River,” he says. “You’ve got the Nadina Glacier up there at the head of it. In a second here we’ll be at the Dadina River. I hardly ever see them above the Nadina, but they’re fairly common below the Dadina.”
    “How often do you see these buffalo?” I ask. “I mean, anywhere around here?”
    “Depends. If they’re crossing a gravel bar or feeding in the willow patches, I’ll see them. But if they’re