I recently read American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon by Steven Rinella, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of buffalo in North America.  It's a fascinating read, one that will leave you better informed -- biologically, culturally, ecologically, historically, and spiritually -- about this magnificent beast. 

Rinella's fascination with buffalo began in the late 1990s in the Madison Mountain Range in southwest Montana, where Rinella stumbled upon an old buffalo skull buried in the ground.  Rinella dug out the skull and carried it home.  With the skull in his possession and a thirst to learn about North America's largest land mammal, Rinella trekked far and wide, including visits to Oxford University in England, a patch of tundra north of the Arctic Circle, and many places in between.

As Rinella describes it,

In my efforts to understand the buffalo, I had to follow the animals.  I've tracked them through mountains and prairies, zoos and ranches, libraries and laboratories, museums and tourist traps.  Sometimes even my own dreams.  This book is my attempt to follow their trail.

His journey culminated in 2005, when Rinella, an eager hunter and ardent environmentalist, won a lottery permit to hunt wild buffalo in the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in south-central Alaska.  That fall, he traveled to Alaska to embark on the epic hunt, which almost killed him along the way.

In American Buffalo, Rinella deftly weaves together his adventurous buffalo hunt with his tireless quest for buffalo knowledge.  And while the intimacy of his relationship with the animal is evident throughout the book, his veneration for buffalo is best captured by the four simple words with which he ends it:

Let the buffalo roam.

(Bison photo by Royalty-free image collection on Flickr)