Free American Buffalo by Steven Rinella Page B

its life. So as it gets bigger, the hairs are less dense because they’re spread over a greater amount of space.) The hair densities of cattle are highly variable between individual animals, but Holstein cattle have hair densities ranging from 550 to 1,095 follicles per square centimeter.
    In the late 1970s, Professor Robert Hudson, the director of the Alberta Veterinary Research Institute, and a team of colleagues attempted to put numbers and figures to the buffalo’s cold tolerance. They selected the six-month-old calves of four creatures: the Tibetan yak, Scottish highland cattle, Hereford cattle, and American buffalo. The researchers put the animals into airtight, insulated boxes resembling horse trailers and subjected each calf to increasingly cold temperatures. They were looking for the moment when the animals’ metabolic rate increased as a response to the cold. They monitored the animals’ breathing with a device that measures the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels going into and coming out of the box. With the input constant, changes in the output represent changes in the animals’ breathing patterns. Hereford cattle hit their critical temperature at 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The yak and the highland cattle hit theirs at –13 degrees Fahrenheit. At –22 degrees Fahrenheit, the buffalo’s metabolic rate was still
decreasing
as an energy-saving strategy. The buffalo’s critical temperature remains unknown, because no one’s gotten a box cold enough to find it.
    While buffalo can tolerate the extreme cold, Mother Nature does have her ways of toppling them in great numbers. Lightning sometimes killed dozens of buffalo in a single zap, leaving their smoldering carcasses on the open ground. Near the great bend in the Arkansas River, a Sioux war party watched a tornado overtake a buffalo herd. It deposited the animals’ carcasses in a quarter-mile-long row that was stacked several buffalo deep. The Indians said that the air pressure from the tornado popped the buffalo’s eyeballs out of their sockets. Disease killed them. In the 1820s, the Sioux described a great disease that killed almost all of the buffalo in southeast Nebraska. Seven warriors were returning from a war with the Missouri River tribes, and they nearly starved while crossing this corner of the state. They found a dying bull with a swollen and rotting tongue. Six of the seven Sioux ate it, and they all died. From then on, they referred to 1825 as “When the Six Died from Eating the Whistling Buffalo.” Wildfires killed them. In 1864, a nineteen-year-old captive of the Oglala Sioux named Fanny Kelly passed through the aftermath of a prairie fire and reported so many buffalo “that had fallen victims to the embrace of the flames” that her captors’ horses had a hard time passing through the pile. Another man watched a herd of buffalo fleeing from a prairie fire near his camp and witnessed “a large number” plunge over a steep riverbank and fall hundreds of feet to get dashed on a rocky shoreline. A Canadian man traveling in North Dakota found herds of burned buffalo that were “dead and dying, blind, lame, singed and roasted.” He said the wounded were “staggering about, sometimes running afoul of a large stone, at other times tumbling down hill and falling into creeks not yet frozen over.” And they got stuck, mired in mud bogs, river bottoms, quicksand, and tar pits. In the summer of 1867, a herd of four thousand buffalo went into the mud at the confluence of the Platte River and Plum Creek, and only two thousand came out. The remaining two thousand—or around 2.5 million pounds of buffalo—joined the riverbed. South of the Platte River, along the Arkansas, an army officer named Dangerfield Parker attempted to stalk a herd of buffalo that were wading in the water. When he got close enough, he realized that the buffalo were perfectly dead. Stuck fast in the mud, the carcasses had become mummified in the dry prairie air.
    It’s been