American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon [Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

Steven Rinella (Author), Patrick Lawlor (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2, 2008

In 2005, Steven Rinella won a lottery to hunt for a wild buffalo, or American bison, in the Alaskan wilderness. One of only four hunters that year who succeeded in killing a buffalo, he carried the carcass down a snow-covered mountainside and floated it four miles down a white-water canyon while being trailed by grizzly bears and suffering from hypothermia. Through this experience, Rinella found himself contemplating his own place among the 14,000 years’ worth of buffalo hunters in North America and the place of the buffalo in the American consciousness. American Buffalo is a narrative tale of that 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 Strait Land Bridge; to buffalo jumps, where Native Americans ran buffalo over cliffs by the hundreds; even to the Bronx Zoo, where legend has it a depressed buffalo served 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 history, science, and the natural world. And yet it also tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, December 2008: Before the 18th century, the American buffalo was the largest land mammal in North America, largely predator-free and roaming the continent in numbers estimated in excess of 40 million. In just over a century, widespread slaughter reduced the population to a few hundred head, and the American West lay beneath a till of bleached bones. When Steven Rinella stumbled over a buffalo skull in Yellowstone National Park, it sparked an obsessive search for the beast's past, from its migration across the Bering land bridge to its near extinction at the hands of western settlers. American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon is his fascinating chronicle, beginning with a search for Black Diamond (the doomed model for the Buffalo Nickel) and including an exploration of "buffalo jumps" (where thousands were run over cliffs by Native American hunters), and tales of bone piles--harvested from the plains for a thriving fertilizer industry--stacked 10 feet high, 20 feet wide, and a half-mile long. Rinella's history is deftly interwoven with his own literal buffalo hunt in Alaska's Wrangell mountains, complete with grizzly bears, raging, ice-rimmed rivers, and bouts of hypothermia and frostbite. Written in a spare style appropriate to the rigors of the frozen wilderness, American Buffalo is engrossing, informative, funny, and a welcome achievement of both natural history and outdoor adventure. --Jon Foro --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this spare, eloquent memoir, Rinella (The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine) describes his fascination with the American bison, which culminated in his tracking, shooting and butchering one. Rinella was one of 24 people in 2005 to win a lottery to hunt buffalo in the foothills of Alaska's Wrangell Mountains. So Rinella set off into the wilderness to fulfill his lifelong ambition. As he pursues the buffalo herd, Rinella also explores the long relationship between humans and an animal that they drove to the edge of extinction. In his journey through the wilderness, Rinella encounters grizzlies, white water rapids and frostbite; in his trek through history he depicts fur traders, early Native Americans and epics of slaughter that left the prairies littered with buffalo bones. Rinella's understated prose shows great flexibility, and he is by turns moving and downright funny. An experienced outdoorsman and hunter, Rinella writes with authority about the process of turning a living creature into steak, and easily renders an enormous amount of historical and scientific information into a thoroughly engaging narrative. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio on MP3-CD Lib Ed; Library edition (December 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1423374177
• ISBN-13: 978-1423374176
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (79 customer reviews)

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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stories and history from a hunter and buffalo enthusiast, December 1, 2008

By 

New England Yankee (Northern New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Like many - and like the author, Steven Rinella - I've been long fascinated by the buffalo, so when given the chance at a new book like this, I snapped it up. For anyone with such a fascination, this book will give you a fix, but be aware that a good portion of its content is written from not only a hunter's perspective, but describes the author's actual buffalo hunt and in detail, right down to the skinning and butchering - the latter down to skinning the head and emptying the eye sockets, for that matter. As someone who has hunted in the past and may do so again, I don't mind that, but a non-hunter may find this content off-putting. Rinella's language can also be a bit explicit at times.

The hunt, in fact, is a thread that runs throughout the book. Rinella starts the book with the hunt and returns to it again and again, touching on different aspects: travel to the hunt site, skinning, portaging (including his life-threatening encounter with the frigid Chetaslina and Copper rivers), etc. From chapter 11 on (about the last quarter of the book), most of the book is about the hunt.

Paradoxically, the last chapter is largely about yet another hunt, this time a Nez Perce treaty rights buffalo hunt in Yellowstone, in which the author tries to weave a number of disparate threads together, from protesters to thankful indians to his own thoughts on "letting the buffalo roam." I believe his intent here is to acknowledge the mixed feelings and motives that all hunters have, but to be honest, he is only partially successful, and I'm left unsure of his message (if any). A bit on holding a weeping protester's hand comes off as particularly awkward.

In the first 10 chapters, Rinella's focus is more on the buffalo itself, and on American and Indian history, on discoveries, cultural themes, and stories. It's easy reading, in the most positive sense, and backed by extensive notes and a bibliography at the back of the book. This is the content I was really looking forward to, there's a lot of it, and it is well-written in an evocative style. Rinella keeps quotes and excerpts to a minimum, re-conveying his source material in anecdotal fashion. As a result, it reads like a story telling. (His own hunt, of course, is a story in itself.) There are few photos, which left me wanting more.

I give American Buffalo five stars as a hunting book, or more accurately, a book written for hunters. I do it with some reluctance, as I would prefer to be reviewing the book for general readership. It is not a book I would recommend to non-hunters, however, and the extensive hunting content will inevitably limit its appeal.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Standing Ovation for Steve Rinella, December 27, 2008

By 

Charles C. Schwartz "doctorxring" (San Antonio, TX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon (Hardcover)

I just finished this book yesterday. A gift from my wife for Christmas. This is a marvelous work. I reflect on this book as an American, a 50 plus year old life-long outdoorsman, poet, and a member of the medical profession. Steve has done the difficult with this book and that is to tie a perfect knot with the truth of his

experience. I can say this with perfect candor as one who has walked similar trails as the one he describes.

To those that have been there, this book will reverberate and feed your soul. You will put the book down

and have remembered, as well as learned. He will give some words to things you have felt, but not said.

To those that look from the outside, that have not experienced the connection that all men have with their

fellow hunters and the prey they hunt, may it bring light to them as well. Your life is connected to another's

death, no matter how civilized or how abstract your perception. How you honor that death is important to your well being. How you guard that life, as well as take it is the full circle of the survival of all. He has

honored the Amercian Buffalo well with this book. Some connected to the buffalo's past were also honorable.

Some were not. This book looks to a brighter future for both man and this amazing creature.

Thanks Steve. I would walk, hunt, or share a meal with you anytime. dxr

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great story for hunter or history buff, December 26, 2008

By 

A Reader "snailgate" (Newark, DE United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

If you grew up, as I did, reading the monthly tales from Warren Page and Jack O'Conner in the hunting and fishing magazines, you will recognise the story arc of this book. It begins with the crash of the prey falling to the thunder of the author's rifle, then moves in flashbacks to how it all happened. It is a familiar story because it can be a good story and this one is one of the best.

I have hunted white-tailed deer in Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Michigan. And lots of smaller game. I am ethically bound to eat what I shoot. I think it is fundamentally wrong to take "trophies" for the wall or to be listed in a record book, whether it fur or finned. I have seen elk and moose in the wild, but never hunted them because I knew it would be way more work than am prepared for if I did manage bring one of them down.

The American Buffalo is even bigger, and if it is a real hunt (not a farm shoot) it means even more work than an elk or moose.

Steven Rinella was up to the work and did a fine job of describing just what the task included. The remoteness, the cold, the difficult terrain, the real probability of grizzly bear or wolves taking the dead bison from him after the shot, are all related in an un-embellished style. Three days of hard labor to prepare 700 pounds of meat and bones and hide to pack out to a freezing river and transport it out.

Along the way he also gives a wonderfull back-story about the place of the Buffalo in human culture in North America. It dovetails nicely with "1491" a book which describes the Western continents just before the arrival of Europeans. Who knew in 1491 there was a city on the Mississippi River that was bigger than London of that time? Steven Rinella explains how the American Buffalo played an important part in supporting that population concentration.

Who would guess that the decline of frogs in American today could be related to the removal of the Buffalo herds from the American plains a hundred years ago? Rinella offers a flow of events that make the Buffalo an intimate essential for the ecology of North American and the culture of its human population for the last twenty thousand years.

Twenty four hunters were issued permits for the seven month season. Rinella and three others were successful. "How can I claim to love the very animal I worked so hard to kill?" Rinella asks himself. "I've thought of this often lately, yet I have not been able to answer it with force and conviction. For now, I

rely on a response that is admitedly glib: I just do, and I always will."

The North American that had Warren and Jack arguing over the merits of the 7mm Magnum Rifle cartridge against the .270 Winchester is long gone. It is our good fortune that Steven Rinella can remind us of what it costs to be a Buffalo hunter.