Read Online American Buffalo by Steven Rinella - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Steven Rinella
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end of the trip, rather than hitchhiking back to where we are now, at the top of the D.
Specifically, the top of the D is where the Klutina River passes below the Richardson Highway just before flowing into the Copper River, which is less than a mile downstream from me. My brother Danny and I are staring at a bunch of gear strewn up and down the riverbank while two of our buddies, Matt Rafferty and Jeff Jessen, inflate the raft with a pair of hand-powered pumps. The four of us are going to travel downriver and hunt together for a few days. If we don’t find a buffalo in that amount of time, I’ll stay behind in Wrangell–St. Elias and they’ll come back with the raft to pick me up at some later date.
Jeff Jessen near the Copper/Klutina confluence.
Right now, we’re sorting through gear, trying to determine how much we can bring. Usually you can pack everything you want in a raft, right down to cases of beer. But this situation is different, because Danny and I are trying to imagine what the raft’s going to look like with eight hundred pounds of buffalo parts in it. It’s highly speculative work. For starters, we don’t really know if we’re going to find a buffalo, let alone how big it will be. Second, we don’t know how much water we’ll have to float the raft in. The air temperature dropped into the teens last night, and the edges of the Klutina are frozen in a skein of ice. Boulders in the middle of the river are capped with frozen splash water, so they look as slick and shiny as greased bowling balls. A few more cold nights like this will set off a chain of events: the glaciers that feed the Copper’s tributaries will slow down in their melting; water levels in the Copper River will drop; more and more rocks and gravel bars will rise above the water’s surface; the raft will drag on the bottom more often; we’ll have to unload the boat to get it unstuck; we’ll start wishing like hell that we hadn’t packed so much gear.
My brother Danny is particularly in tune to the workings of rivers because he’s a freshwater ecologist with the University of Alaska. He’s coming along because we have an unspoken brotherly tie that says he has to. Our companions, Rafferty and Jessen, are in tune to the doings of rivers because they’re both whitewater enthusiasts. They’re coming along partly because it’s their raft and partly because they’re hoping to get their hands on a bit of free-range organic buffalo meat. I first became aware of Jessen, a hospital administrator, and Rafferty, an environmental activist, while hanging around at backyard barbecues in Anchorage. The town has a thriving community of people in their twenties and thirties who moved to the state looking for wilderness thrills, and these folks get drawn into summertime salmon cookouts like raccoons to garbage. You’ll find out about common acquaintances while talking about getting lost on a mountain, or digging clams, or flipping a boat in a river while hunting caribou. During such conversations, I heard that Jessen once spent ten days holed up in a snow cave during a blizzard on a mountain. I heard about how Rafferty was watching a grizzly bear one day when another grizzly bear came along and killed it and ate its guts. Another time, I heard a story about how the two of them were rafting with some friends when a landslide peeled off a mountain and came ripping down the slope, trees and all. A descending tree limb grabbed a girl’s life jacket and, as my friend described it, “deposited her in the river like an anchor. She just vanished. Then the limb broke, and she came popping back up.” The landslide caused a minor tsunami that beached the raft so far up on the riverbank that they had to drag the boat back down to the water.
The number of weird things that happen to a person in the wild is directly proportional to how much time that person spends in the wild, and I figured that these would be some useful guys to have around. Danny had
Specifically, the top of the D is where the Klutina River passes below the Richardson Highway just before flowing into the Copper River, which is less than a mile downstream from me. My brother Danny and I are staring at a bunch of gear strewn up and down the riverbank while two of our buddies, Matt Rafferty and Jeff Jessen, inflate the raft with a pair of hand-powered pumps. The four of us are going to travel downriver and hunt together for a few days. If we don’t find a buffalo in that amount of time, I’ll stay behind in Wrangell–St. Elias and they’ll come back with the raft to pick me up at some later date.
Jeff Jessen near the Copper/Klutina confluence.
Right now, we’re sorting through gear, trying to determine how much we can bring. Usually you can pack everything you want in a raft, right down to cases of beer. But this situation is different, because Danny and I are trying to imagine what the raft’s going to look like with eight hundred pounds of buffalo parts in it. It’s highly speculative work. For starters, we don’t really know if we’re going to find a buffalo, let alone how big it will be. Second, we don’t know how much water we’ll have to float the raft in. The air temperature dropped into the teens last night, and the edges of the Klutina are frozen in a skein of ice. Boulders in the middle of the river are capped with frozen splash water, so they look as slick and shiny as greased bowling balls. A few more cold nights like this will set off a chain of events: the glaciers that feed the Copper’s tributaries will slow down in their melting; water levels in the Copper River will drop; more and more rocks and gravel bars will rise above the water’s surface; the raft will drag on the bottom more often; we’ll have to unload the boat to get it unstuck; we’ll start wishing like hell that we hadn’t packed so much gear.
My brother Danny is particularly in tune to the workings of rivers because he’s a freshwater ecologist with the University of Alaska. He’s coming along because we have an unspoken brotherly tie that says he has to. Our companions, Rafferty and Jessen, are in tune to the doings of rivers because they’re both whitewater enthusiasts. They’re coming along partly because it’s their raft and partly because they’re hoping to get their hands on a bit of free-range organic buffalo meat. I first became aware of Jessen, a hospital administrator, and Rafferty, an environmental activist, while hanging around at backyard barbecues in Anchorage. The town has a thriving community of people in their twenties and thirties who moved to the state looking for wilderness thrills, and these folks get drawn into summertime salmon cookouts like raccoons to garbage. You’ll find out about common acquaintances while talking about getting lost on a mountain, or digging clams, or flipping a boat in a river while hunting caribou. During such conversations, I heard that Jessen once spent ten days holed up in a snow cave during a blizzard on a mountain. I heard about how Rafferty was watching a grizzly bear one day when another grizzly bear came along and killed it and ate its guts. Another time, I heard a story about how the two of them were rafting with some friends when a landslide peeled off a mountain and came ripping down the slope, trees and all. A descending tree limb grabbed a girl’s life jacket and, as my friend described it, “deposited her in the river like an anchor. She just vanished. Then the limb broke, and she came popping back up.” The landslide caused a minor tsunami that beached the raft so far up on the riverbank that they had to drag the boat back down to the water.
The number of weird things that happen to a person in the wild is directly proportional to how much time that person spends in the wild, and I figured that these would be some useful guys to have around. Danny had
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