In the winter of 1841, the furnace blast of a Chinook wind came roaring down out of the Wyoming Rockies and melted the top layer of snow on the plains. When it froze again, it locked the great buffalo herds away from the grasses they depended on. It was the Tantalus myth all over again, the grass just out of reach underneath the steely ice. Ordinarily, buffalo uncover their food by brushing away the snow with their massive heads, wagging them back and forth to some celestial rhythm inaccessible to us. But the ice blanket made all that impossible. Next spring, millions of buffalo carcasses littered the landscape.
As Dale F. Lott points out in his movingly written and scientifically persuasive American Bison, the buffalo herds never returned to the Wyoming plains. It was a classic winter kill. And permanent. I retell that story here because it's one of the few moments in either of these two fine books when mankind isn't the culprit in some awful and regrettable tale of species extinction. We are currently losing an estimated 30,000 species a year, the worst extinction rate since a visitant asteroid slammed into us 65 million years ago.
What's amazing about Lott's book is how powerfully written it is. For instance, after quickly laying out the physics of the Chinook winds - that they gain 5.5 degrees of heat for each thousand feet they descend along the mountain face - Lott says: "After 5,000 feet of this . . . the air is 27.5 degrees warmer than it was, and spring can arrive like a fast freight train." "I can see that," you want to say. "Hear it and feel it, too."
Lott has spent a career studying buffalo. His book is an omnium gatherum of what we know about this beast, including its history: Once a vast herd of 30 million busted and constantly renewed the Great Plains. Its habitat: the sea of grass between Texas and Manitoba, Colorado to Iowa. Its filial devotion: An orphan calf once walked alongside Meriwether Lewis for an entire day as he pushed westward. And its predators: to a trivial extent wolf and anthrax, but to a fatal extent humans. In about half a century, we nearly managed to kill them all, for robes, for huge leather belts used in industrial machinery and for sport. With a little more effort, you'd think, we could have gotten them all.
Lott is especially good on the creatures that live alongside the buffalo. For instance, prairie-dog language is parsed into barks, as when a golden eagle is eyeing them hungrily, or jump-yips, when a snake arrives. A bark usually sends other dogs scurrying for their burrows, but a jump-yip usually draws a crowd. Now it is less clear who the hunter is. The prairie dogs fling soil in the snake's face, turn ing their backs and kicking with their hind feet. They may dart to its tail, bite deeply into its flesh, then leap away out of range of its answering strike.
A discussion of coyotes and badgers leads to the cooperative hunts that these adversaries manage. Ordinarily, coyotes eat badger pups. But sometimes a badger will dig out a new-found squirrel burrow, driving its inhabitants up into the waiting maw of a coyote, who will return the favor by chasing some of them back down toward the badger. Squirrels catch hell from both directions, says Lott. This cooperation, by the way, was celebrated in Indian folktale long before it was noted by wildlife biologists. Plainly, those who once lived inside Nature were capable of the same sort of tireless scrutiny that makes modern science possible.
One of the first things to decide when you come to write a book is whether it will be the result of your research or the record of your progress toward that result. Lott's book is triumphantly the former, the outcome of a lifetime spent around buffalo. But Robert Twigger uproariously chooses the latter tack for his book on the hairbreadth escape of the Pere David's deer from the jaws of extinction. More properly called milu, Pere David's deer were originally named after the Basque naturalist, explorer and missionary Père Armand David (1826-1900), a member of the French religious order of St. Vincent de Paul (the Lazarists). David was the first Westerner to describe the beast.
In China, its native land, the milu had already been extinct in the wild for a thousand years, but it survived in imperial zoos and game parks (likely because it tastes good - such are the ironies of survival). Since the Lazarists, like the Jesuits, are an educational order, Père David was at pains to send back a careful description of the milu's strange concatenation of mammalian body parts: tail like a donkey, head like a deer, neck like a camel, hooves like a cow.
In time, a whole herd of milu was propagated in Britain at Woburn Abbey, the estate of Herbrand Russell, the 11th Duke of Bedford. Today, no milu exist in the world apart from those descended from the original herd at Woburn Abbey. So you can put down the salvation of this species to just two men, the eponymous Père David and the justifiably noble Duke of Bedford.
This book is many things: travel, history and natural history, as well as an essay on the idea of extinction and resurrection, which is worked out in an extended metaphor dealing with the life-cycles of books at a Cairo used-book market. Robert Twigger is no scientist, but he is a thinker and a poet. And a writer.
In the end, it's tragedy, or near tragedy, that brings the ordinary punters into the environmental sideshow, isn't it? Here are two creatures that were very nearly lost - in fact, what survives of each is probably a pale shadow of its former menacing and glorious self. But both of them are edible, and in the case of the bison its hide made amazing cloaks, having 10 times more hairs per square inch than cow skin. Over a Great Plains winter, a buffalo robe was a very good thing to have. The question is, how did a nation of a few million manage to lose 30 million buffalo robes?
The Washington Post
