From Boldtype.
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In 2005, Steven Rinella was one of 24 individuals to win one of the rarest lotteries in the world. For his luck, he was awarded a permit by the government of Alaska to hunt and kill a wild American bison in the Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park. For Rinella — a correspondent for Outside Magazine who has been obsessed with buffalo for more than a decade — this hunt becomes an intellectual road trip, which leaves him exploring thousands of years of history, science, and popular culture.
And what a varied trip it is. He takes an old, treasured bison skull he once found on a hike in southern Montana to a laboratory in England to have it carbon dated. He attempts to discover the remains of Black Diamond — the buffalo once housed at the Central Park Zoo in New York and believed to be the model for the engraving on the buffalo nickel coin. He looks for artifacts left behind by the first people to hunt American bison and tells the stories of famous 19th century buffalo hunters who almost exterminated the species.
But at its heart, this is an adventure story which doesn’t disappoint. Even as he tracks his target across the Alaskan wilderness, Rinella is stalked in turn by grizzly bears. He burns dried buffalo chips for fuel; the reader must take on faith that the smoke smells of “cinnamon and cloves, dried straw and pumpkins.” After he makes his kill, he butchers the carcass and carries out a thousand pounds of meat and hide on his back, piece by piece. And, as he returns to civilization, he’s threatened by a freezing river and the onset of hypothermia.
American Buffalo is everything that nature writing should be — Rinella’s prose is muscular, evocative, and utterly dominated by his passion for the subject. This book succeeds where other hunting narratives often fail because Rinella both understands and is willing to explain the inherent contradiction of trying to kill something he holds dear.
