Where the buffalo fall: Montana resumes hunts

GALLATIN NATIONAL FOREST, Mont.

Boots crunching on iced-over snow, Jeff Vader creeps toward the world's last wild herd of pure buffalo.

The 50-year-old crouches behind a cluster of juniper trees and puts a finger to his lips. Four men behind him fall mute. Vader points his rifle at the biggest bull, and becomes part of a contentious experiment to control an icon of the American West.

Vader has one of 50 permits from Montana to kill a buffalo during the state's first legal hunt of the animal in 15 years. The animals belong to a herd of 4,000 that roams in Yellowstone National Park, where hunting is banned. But winter snows chase them across park boundaries into southern Montana, where they are not welcome.

The buffalo can carry brucellosis, a disease that causes cows to abort and that Montana views as a threat to its $1 billion cattle industry. The state confines the buffalo to a narrow slice of land, and chases them back to the park by helicopter and snowmobile should they venture too close to the few nearby ranches with cattle. Sometimes the buffalo are killed; this year, about 500 have been herded into pens and slaughtered.

Montana officials and hunters hope the hunt can provide a way of controlling the herd's movements. Most game animals — including elk and antelope — are managed by regulated hunts that keep herds at an optimum size, not so big that they steal habitat from other species but not so small that they risk extinction.

"It's more dignified for the buffalo to be hunted than to be put in trucks and hauled off to slaughter," said Terry Suhr, 49, a taxidermist.

Environmentalists agree — to a point. They have long decried the way Montana treats buffalo.

"Yellowstone Park was started to protect the last buffalo ... and we're slaughtering them to protect animals that aren't even native to Montana," said Mike Mease, co-founder of the Buffalo Field Campaign, which monitors and protests Montana's treatment of the creatures.

Mease, 44, is a hunter who seeks to strengthen the alliance of environmental and hunting groups across the West that has helped preserve habitat for waterfowl and elk.

His group shadows buffalo hunters, carrying recruiting brochures and objections — they oppose the hunt, arguing that it is "canned" because the buffalo in Montana are treated like domestic animals, confined to a few thousand acres.

Vader and his hunting buddies have thought about these issues: Is it sporting to stalk a creature that is so oblivious to danger that, 125 years ago, millions were slaughtered by hunters who could ride into the herds?

Buffalo, also known as the American bison, are found throughout the West but mostly live on ranches and are largely descended from cross-breeding with cattle. The Yellowstone herd is among the few that have no cross-breeding in their lineages and the only one that roams wild.

For several years until 1991, Montana's Department of Fish, Parks and Wildlife held hunts to control the buffalo. State wildlife agents would lead hunters to buffalo that ventured too far into Montana, then point out ones they could shoot. They even provided a tractor to haul away each 1-ton carcass. Protests by environmentalists set off a national outcry, and the state canceled the hunt.

Gov. Brian Schweitzer, an avid hunter and former cattle rancher, said he was no fan of that approach.

When he approved the latest hunt, he said he wanted it to be a true sporting event. In Montana, he said, "we like to hunt. We're not people that put a bucket of grain behind our house so we can shoot an elk off our deck. We like to get out."

The governor acknowledged that buffalo would never be as difficult to hunt as skittish animals. But he said he hoped they would develop a healthy fear of humans to make their pursuit more challenging, which would lead him to increase the number of buffalo-hunting permits.

Schweitzer also is trying to persuade Yellowstone-area ranchers who have small herds of cattle to move them so the buffalo can roam more freely in the state. That would end the need for the systematic herding that last month caused a group of buffalo to flee onto an iced-over lake and fall in. Two drowned.

As the five hunters in the Vader party gather in the breakfast room of a Gardiner, Mont., motel at 6 a.m. on a recent Monday, they shake their heads and mutter regretfully about the drownings.

Neither Vader nor his brother David, who drove from Denver, has hunted buffalo before. Jeff Vader shot a grizzly bear in Alaska 20 years ago but now chases elk and deer. They savor the chance to stalk a creature that rarely has been legal to hunt.

George Stirner, a grizzled outdoorsman to whom the group looks for guidance, talks about the joy of hunting.

"It's a challenge to meet a wild animal on its own ground, its own turf," he says. But, he admits, buffalo are more docile than other wild animals.

The hunters soon spot several buffalo. They pour out of their trucks and scale ridges to circle the animals. But the buffalo wander off. The hunters follow and Vader lies on his belly and takes aim.

Vader's permit allows one kill, and the animals are too close to each other. A bullet might pierce one and hit the other. He waits. Suddenly, a sound like thunder shakes the hillside. The buffalo run off.

"Our first lesson in hunting buffalo," Vader says with a smile. "They spook."

The party gives chase, running up and down another set of ridges. "Now this is hunting," Stirner says.

When the buffalo cross into private land, the hunters decide to look elsewhere; they drive farther until they spot 13 buffalo strung out on a plateau rimmed with cedar and juniper. Behind them is the snowcapped 10,969-foot Electric Peak and other mountains that form the northern boundary of Yellowstone.

The party splits. Two hunters circle around to drive the buffalo closer to Vader. He and Stirner position themselves behind a boulder. The bison move toward Vader, in single file. The silence of the morning is shattered by the roar of the rifle. A bull collapses, then rolls over, legs twitching, and is still.

"Not a record, but he'll be good eating," Vader says. "Cabernet Franc, you think?"

"Definitely a red," his brother David answers.

But the hunters' work has just begun. They spend three hours skinning the massive buffalo carcass and carving 500 pounds of edible flesh from its bones. "That weighs more than a sack of concrete," Jeff Vader says as he lifts one haunch onto a sled.

At the end, they peel off their bloodied overalls and gloves, pass around a bottle of bourbon and size up the pile of bones, suitcase-sized lungs and other organs they're leaving on the plateau for coyotes and ravens. It's been more than six hours since the hunt began, and they are contemplative.

"Just seeing an animal like this, so large and beautiful," says Tom Literski, 56. "I'll always remember this."

The hunters pile into their trucks and drive off. Six other buffalo were killed that day. Vader saw nothing wrong with the hunt. But the experience strengthened his belief that buffalo need space to roam, and that hunting is the way to control their habitat.

Vader follows the buffalo controversy more closely once he returns to his home in Helena. He complains to co-workers about the way Montana treats such "majestic animals."

"They don't like to read about 500 buffalo being hauled to slaughter," Vader says of his co-workers. "They say, 'I'd pay a lot of money to hunt one.' "