This is flat out the best book I have read so far this year. Mr Rinella's interest in buffalo started years ago when he discovered a partial skull while walking in the woods. That's not a particularly unusual event...folks around here find them fairly regularly and never think too much about it. Rinella's mind works on a higher level, however. He went to considerable time and expense to learn about his find, travelling great distances, and even going to the extent of having the skull radiocarbon

This is flat out the best book I have read so far this year. Mr Rinella's interest in buffalo started years ago when he discovered a partial skull while walking in the woods. That's not a particularly unusual event...folks around here find them fairly regularly and never think too much about it. Rinella's mind works on a higher level, however. He went to considerable time and expense to learn about his find, travelling great distances, and even going to the extent of having the skull radiocarbon dated and DNA tested.



The result of Rinella's fascination with the bison, or buffalo as he prefers to call them, is this very excellent, wonderfully-researched book. There are actually several story lines in here. One story line concerns Rinella's skull, or rather Rinella's buffalo skull, and outlines his odyssey in trying to identify the age and specific species of the relic. The second story line concerns his research into the origin of the beast, its importance to the indigenous peoples of North America, and the near extirpation of the species due to deliberate over-hunting. These story lines (I can't call them sections or chapters because everything is intertwined here) are completely engrossing. Anything that Rinella does not know about buffalo is probably not worth knowing. To put the icing on the cake, Rinella was drawn to harvest a buffalo in Godknowswhere, Alaska. This was probably the part of the book that appealed to me the most.



If you have never been by yourself, on foot, in an area that cannot be reached by road and where your cellphone is useless, maybe you won't fully appreciate this hunt. It's liberating and spooky all at the same time! Throw in some grizzlies and inclement weather and you have a trip that will make some people frightened and miserable, but a few will draw the deep breaths of the (temporarily) free man.



Rinella does a great job relating his stalk and eventual kill. First comes the elation, and then the bitter realization that the carcass is some miles from his lonesome camp. This puts me in mind of an old saying regarding moose hunting: "moose hunting is a lot of fun until somebody shoots a moose". So Rinella, by himself, in grizzly country, has to make this huge beast into meat and get it back to camp. I remember a sweetheart deal I got on 3 bison about 10 years ago. I purchased 3 bison, 2 bulls and a heifer, from a farmer going out of the buffalo business. The condition was that these critters were on the hoof and getting them from that condition to the freezer was our concern. We started out one rainy morning in May, put the animals out of their misery, skinned them, gutted them and quartered them. We had the help of the rancher who hoisted the animals with her frontend loader, and also had a chainsaw for quartering. This job took us until dusk, and there were 3 of us! Rinella had an animal on the ground and no help to do this onerous task. Needless to say, the job required multiple trips back to camp, through grizzly territory and smeared with buffalo juice. I developed a real respect for him here, and I'm sure the forest creatures could hear his brass balls clanking together with every stride.



Rinella makes no apologies for his enjoyment of the hunting experience. A lot of folks eat hamburger but wouldn't want to personally kill a cow, and he's fine with that. Hunters are always being asked why we hunt, when all we have to do is buy meat at the store where no animals were hurt. My argument is that if God didn't want us to hunt animals, He wouldn't have made them out of meat.



I borrowed this book from the library, but I fully intend to buy a hardcover copy for myself. I know I'll be reading it again. The book isn't perfect, though. It has photos, but these are small and printed on regular paper. Maybe in the hardcover the photos will be better presented. There are a few small mistakes, like the use of the word "sheaves" instead of "sheaths" on P221, and on P169 he claims Dave Mather was an ancestor of Cotton Mather, when he should have said descendant, since Dave was born in 1851 and Cotton in 1663. These small considerations aside, this is a wonderful book and one I will be reading again. Soon.