IX. Conserving Bison Genes on a Large-Scale Landscape
Prologue
Avast, placid sea undulates slightly, as though to the rise and fall of the tide, staining the ground in all directions to the horizon. Though this sea contains no water, it moves in unison, rippling up and down, forging ever forward: herds of bison covering the landscape. Their dark brown shaggy humps rise not with a tide, but with the rolling hills. A dust cloud billows in their wake. Their baritone grunts, swelling and ebbing with the herd, carry across the Great Plains.
Late September nights in the backcountry of Yellowstone don’t hold warmth. They grow cold quickly. We had a reasonable pile of broken branches to feed the flames of our campfire until night called and we’d crawl into the down bags waiting inside our tent. Flickering shadows danced skyward against the lodgepole pine canopy, and an ebbing glow from the campfire leapt out across the forest floor. The snap and crackle of the fire was occasionally interrupted by nearby Lone Star Geyser as it fumed and sputtered and loosed a steaming whoosh of hot water, sending rivulets gurgling down to the Firehole River.
Though not our first backpacking trek through the park, we still had understandably nervous thoughts of grizzlies clacking teeth in the middle of the night, their low but unmistakable growl filling our ears. What we didn’t count on was the bison. Here in the forest. As the animal ambled along the firelight’s periphery, we couldn’t tell in the fading twilight if it was a bull or a cow. But at a weight north of one thousand pounds, male or female, it didn’t matter. It could inflict broken bones and trample our tent just by turning around. Nudging more wood into the flames, we watched the bison linger along the rim of firelight and then settle to the ground for the night.
Bison are deceptive. They are ponderous in their bulk, and their expressionless demeanor lends a certain stolidness. Matriarchal in herd structure, they are quick to defend their young, always conscious of nearby predators. They also are surprisingly nimble, capable of turning quickly and accelerating to forty mph. Bison are a mammalian relic from deep out of the past that are amazing to watch as they move in herds across the landscape or simply hunker down to bask in the sun while their calves frolic. They are powerful creatures, physically and iconically. Wander into an art gallery in the West and odds are good you’ll find images of bison staring out from canvases. Potent images of stout, indomitable animals that are hard to turn your eyes from. They are portrayed as they stand on the landscape, and at times in surrealistic, neon hues as the artist strives to depict their spirituality.
Back in 2007, the folks in West Yellowstone, Montana, no doubt recognizing the representation of wildness and strength in bison, staged a “Where the Painted Buffalo Roam” fundraiser for their town. This campaign featured twenty-six three-quarter-sized fiberglass cow bison statues painted by select artists to reflect themes from Yellowstone and Native American people from the region. These bison stood in various public places around town for a period of months, and then were auctioned off. The paintings on the bison statues were wide-ranging. One depicted the park’s Upper Geyser Basin in full steam mode, another feral horses at full gallop, another, the artist noted, “an attempt to portray part of the North Plains Indian belief in the legend of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Woman, who came down from the heavens long ago to show the people the way to the sacred path.” The highest bid, of $17,000, went for a bison painted on one side to show turn-of-the-century tourists exploring Yellowstone by tally-ho coaches, and on the other a scene of yellow touring buses. The project raised $161,500. Cattle canvases would not have fared as well.
That night in the backcountry of Yellowstone, the animal that shared our campsite was an ancient animal, figuratively. The Bison genus stretches back some two million years to Asia. Somehow, through all the ice ages and despite all the long-toothed predators, it never went extinct. It probably should have, at least once or twice, as did the camels, mammoths, and ground sloths. Bison somewhat recently arrived in North America, about two hundred thousand years ago during glacial periods that dropped sea levels and allowed a land bridge to surface and connect Asia to the land we know today as Alaska. By crossing the thousand-mile-long strip known as Beringia, which now has been underwater for about twenty thousand years, the animals reached a new continent with near-endless possibilities for their kind.
The bison in Yellowstone’s Hayden Valley really don’t look much different from those who made the crossing. Oh, they are smaller, their horns closer to their skulls, their bodies more compact. We know this thanks to Walter and Ruth Roman. The couple literally scraped, or, more precisely, blasted, a living from the land with their Lucky Seven Mining Co. Summer into early fall 1979 found the Romans at their placer mine along Pearl Creek above the Chatanika River, sixteen miles northeast of Fairbanks, Alaska.1 Their tool of choice was a pressurized hose that spit out a nearly six-inch-wide torrent of water that could cut through the permafrost and, hopefully, expose gold-bearing rubble. This particular form of mining, known as “hydraulicking,” dates to the Roman Empire. Those Romans didn’t know everything, though, and miners during the California Gold Rush of the 1850s greatly improved the technology by adding a nozzle to create a more forceful jet of water to tear into hillsides.
What the modern-day Romans found as they slowly eroded the hillside into muddy torrents was not gold, but not entirely invaluable, either.2 Under their watchful eyes, the powerful sluice of water raked back and forth and back across the slope, thawing, chewing, gashing, slashing, and washing away a slurry of sediments, pulling away rocks and soil and debris from the past thirty-six thousand years. No gold fell away, but mired in the muck were the hindquarters of a prehistoric creature jutting out like some massive tree trunk. With a tail. Dubbed “Blue Babe,” in part for the color of the long-buried carcass, this steppe bison (Bison priscus), as paleontologists would later conclude, must have been a magnificent animal when breath filled its lungs, blood flowed through its veins, and rippled muscles flexed its hide as it walked. Blue Babe stood almost seven feet tall at the shoulder, weighed a ton or so, and had crescent-shaped horns ranging more than three feet from tip to tip. Those horns weren’t for show, not at all, but for defense, for survival. Driven forward by two thousand pounds of bone and brawn and fury, they could be particularly effective. The animal’s size and strength enabled it to endure on the mammoth steppe during the Pleistocene. It was a cold, somewhat arid place, covered with grasslands that wandered across the landscape then as they do today across the Great Plains of the United States and southern Canada. Forbs—herbaceous flowering plants—grasses, and perhaps willow shrubs provided the forage the great beast consumed and, in turn, transformed into muscle.
Blue Babe grazed this landscape with other bison, of course, but also with woolly mammoths, musk oxen, and horses. As they all fell into the category of prey for the carnivores of the day, they needed to keep watch for packs of dire wolves, short-faced bears, and American lions. The lions were among the big apex predators on the Pleistocene landscape, much larger than their relatives of today, though lacking the manes of African lions. The males that preyed on the likes of Blue Babe weighed more than 900 pounds, and possibly as many as 1,100 pounds.3 Females were smaller by a few hundred pounds, but, like wolves today, their tendency to hunt in small groups enabled them to overwhelm their prey from all sides and tilt the battle in their favor. They’d stalk, feint, and charge, take swipes and bites, always searching for a weakness, for an opening to launch a fatal attack.
