Free American Buffalo by Steven Rinella

met Rafferty a couple times but he’d never hung out with him for that long; he knew Jessen a little bit better, and described him to me as having an infectious enthusiasm that would be suitable to a used-car salesman. He arranged for the three of us to meet for a beer at Humpy’s, a popular downtown Anchorage bar on West Sixth Avenue. Jessen is short and stocky, with a square build and slightly crooked teeth. He was wearing a wool jacket with a yoked back and oversized buttons, and his fingers were nicked up with many little cuts. I’d been prepared to talk Jessen into making the trip, but no such persuasion was necessary. He ordered a beer and a blackened-halibut sandwich, rolled out a few maps, and jumped right into the nitty-gritty details of what it would take to float the Copper River. When we left, Jessen said, “I can’t totally commit until I talk this over with Rafferty. It’s his raft, too.”
    I awaited Jessen’s call for a week, but he never got back to me. I called him, and he didn’t call me back. I couldn’t imagine what the problem was. I’d been blown off, and for no good reason! After eight days had passed, I started to work out a whole new set of plans that didn’t rely on anyone else’s input. Then one night Danny was hanging out at a party and talking about buffalo hunting with some guy, and the guy says, “I heard that Matt Rafferty’s going on a buffalo hunt, too.”
    “What?” Danny said. “Are you serious? With who?”
    “I don’t know. I guess Jeff Jessen knows someone who has a brother who drew a buffalo tag for the Copper River.”
    “That’s
my
brother,” said Danny. “That’s us!”

    NEAR ITS CONFLUENCE with the Copper River, the Klutina flows through a narrow channel bracketed by heavy stands of spruce trees and steep banks formed by fist- and head-sized rocks. We can only see what is immediately in front of us on the sharp bends, so our course down the river relies on snap decisions. Danny and I are sitting toward the bow of the raft, me on the starboard side and Danny on port. We’re each wearing a dry suit, these one-piece jobbies with watertight zippers, built-in bootees, and neoprene gaskets that cinch around your neck and wrists to prevent the intrusion of liquid. Basically, it’s like wearing a body-sized latex condom, except it’s your neck that emerges through the opening rather than the base of your pecker. Pulled over layers of heavy clothes, the suits restrict our movements and make our paddling sluggish. Rafferty and Jessen are at the stern, shouting out commands. “Hard on left . . . No, hard on right . . . Hard on right, go, go
go.
” We maneuver the raft like a tank on tracks; the sharpest turns are executed by moving one side forward and the other side backward. When I turn around, I see that Rafferty has a big grin on his face. He’s got a runner’s build, tall and thin, with blond hair capped by a tasseled hat. He seems like the kind of guy who’d be happy even if he had to shovel horse shit—so long as it was next to whitewater.
    The confluence of the two rivers reminds me of the junction where an alleyway meets an expressway. During the peak spring runoff, the Klutina dumps an average of 7,080 cubic feet of water per second into the Copper River, which itself carries an annual average of 57,400 cubic feet per second. That’s like having 57,400 soccer balls roll past you in the time that it takes you to say “one-Mississippi.” But the soccer balls do not roll by in one heavy mass; instead, they are broken into many different channels, or braids. In places, the Copper River is split into six or more braids, stretched across a mile-wide floodplain. The braids twist together and split apart like frayed rope, tangling themselves around scores of long, narrow islands. The river is constantly moving these islands, at once destroying some and creating others. If an island can hold for a few years, it becomes armored with a carpeting of sedges