Steven Rinella’s American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon is excellent look at the natural history of the North American bison, framed by the author’s hunt of a buffalo in Alaska in 2006. As his trek illustrates in gripping, gory detail, the connection between humans and bison has always been complicated. Bison are the oldest kind of meat on the continent, but they have also carried a heavy symbolic weight for centuries, if not millennia – as food, as collections of usable flesh and bone, as holy creatures, as emblems of the West and of America itself. Rinella does a superb job examining all these aspects of the buffalo, and telling a great adventure story, too.
This passage on the buffalo’s extraordinary ability to withstand the cold is maybe my favorite bit in the book:
