Re-Bisoning the West. Kurt Repanshek
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himself back to that epoch, what better way to understand its wildlife than through the art the hunters left behind? Guthrie came away from a 1979 conference in Switzerland determined to try “to place Paleolithic art in a larger dimension of natural history and [link] artistic behavior to our evolutionary past.”4 Among the professional papers that flowed from Guthrie’s travels was one in which he wondered why the artists were drawn to create images of animals we refer to today as charismatic megafauna, the great beasts of their day thousands of years ago. Did the pinstriped horses and polka-dotted reindeer these people painted actually trot across the landscape, or were they embellished creatures the artists held in esteem? Why did so many scenes depict hunting?
In July 1979, when the Romans called Guthrie, the paleontological puzzle confronting him, quite ignominiously, was protruding butt-first from the hillside. Guthrie, assisted by his wife, Mary Lee, and son, Owen, walked up to the muddy, well-preserved but slightly frozen bison rump and was immediately struck by the smell, “a rich, pungent rottenness, like nothing else I have smelled.”
“It was a rottenness aged for millennia in the frost—not a stench, but a sweet, intense tang,” he recalled.
The source of that stench was thawing quickly, too quickly to study from its awkward resting place. When the rear half of the bison began to tear away from the front end that was still securely frozen in place, Guthrie arranged to have it carted off to the University of Alaska and the Institute of Arctic Biology. Once there, it was put in cold storage in a walk-in freezer. When the animal’s head and shoulders melted free, they too went into deep freeze there. During an ensuing necropsy, the equivalent of a human autopsy, on the stunningly complete remains, Guthrie pieced together a theory for how Blue Babe died. And it wasn’t what most of us would think. His conclusion did not support a quick death by a pride of lions that had little trouble tearing into the animal. This bull had dense neck muscles covered by thick, sheet-like layers of skin. They formed a tough physiological laminate that a lion couldn’t easily clamp its jaws around. As a result, the cats would resort to smothering their prey. And that’s what Guthrie figured had happened.
“Using claws for a secure hold, a lion will throw a buffalo down and clamp the buffalo’s entire nose and mouth in a firm bite or clamp the trachea closed,”5 he explained. With Blue Babe, the paleobiologist based his theory on puncture wounds coupled with stains left by blood clots that had formed around the bull’s snout. But there was a twist in this case, which was unusual from the start. Why wasn’t the carcass devoured? Guthrie theorized that fewer than three lions were involved in attacking the bison, and that the carcass froze solid before they could consume much of it. Lending credence to that theory was that a tooth fragment from one of the predators, possibly broken off as the lion tried to tear through the frozen hide, was later found in Babe’s neck by a taxidermist.6
Because so much of the carcass was intact for the Romans to jet wash out of the hillside, Guthrie surmised that Blue Babe died early in winter. Bitterly cold temperatures turned the bison’s skin into a sheet-metal-like barrier that no predator could penetrate.7 Then, before spring thaw could arrive with warming temperatures that would soften the skin, bloat the carcass, and spew the odors that would bring the predators and scavengers back, Blue Babe was buried by sediments. Perhaps they came in one large swoosh of a muddy torrent unleashed by snowmelt. Or perhaps there was an avalanche that sent snow and soil down atop the carcass. And then some more layers were added for good measure, and they, in turn, froze. This process, repeated again and again, cemented the bison’s remains in permafrost, out of reach of predators and scavengers and out of sight for tens of thousands of years until the Romans came along with their powerful hose in search of gold.
The preservation of the find, the seeming freshness of it, Guthrie later told a gathering at the thirty-second Alaska Science Conference in 1981, was simply amazing. And, no doubt surprisingly to most of us, appealing in a gastronomical context.
“Red meat in the mud. It is really a dramatic thing to all of a sudden fall into your lap, to see this coming out—an animal that no longer exists, with black hair, wool, and fat,”8 he told his spellbound audience. While the remaining flesh might not have looked butcher-shop fresh, even after thirty-six thousand or more years it didn’t look too far gone to sample. So one evening in 1984 Guthrie invited the taxidermist who was able to showcase Blue Babe in repose for the university’s museum and some friends for bowls of Blue Babe stew. “The meat was well aged but still a little tough, and it gave the stew a strong Pleistocene aroma, but nobody there would have dared to miss it,” said the paleontologist.
The bison’s nickname, “Blue Babe,” was derived from both the mythical, oversized ox that accompanied the legendary lumberjack Paul Bunyan of American folklore9 and from the bluish hue left on the bison’s skin due to a chemical reaction between minerals in the surrounding soil, phosphorous from the skin, and the air. Babe was just one of the ancestors of today’s Bison bison. Coexisting with the bull for a time, but eventually succeeding it, was the Ice Age Bison latifrons, or long-horned bison, a massive beast at more than eight feet tall and more than two tons on the hoof. It shared the landscape for about one hundred thousand years with Bison antiquus. Then arrived Bison occidentalis for a somewhat short period and, finally, today’s Bison bison.10
Collectively, the various subspecies demonstrate how, down through the millennia, the populations of these now iconic animals rose and fell and evolved, facing climate change and enduring predation by four-, and later two-, legged carnivores. Their numbers and physiques altered to suit the times, standing large and massive when the climate produced mild seasons of plentiful vegetation, and shrinking smaller and less hulking during glacial periods when forage was comparatively scarce and a smaller body size better maintained core temperature. No other land-based megafauna have endured through the ages as have bison. They are hard not to admire, not just for their appearance but also their perseverance and uncanny adaptability.
Early man venerated bison much as we do today, probably to a greater degree, because the animals provided food, shelter, and warmth. When Blue Babe was being attacked by that lion, or lions, on the other side of the world in Europe humans were accustomed to blocking the cold of winter with the heavy robes of bison and other furry ungulates and nourishing themselves with the equivalent of bison ribeyes.11 Paintings adorning the walls of caves at Altamira, Spain, portray bold, handsome bison. Many of those sprawling images, some of which are life-size, were crafted in life-mimicking pigments.12 These were not mere stick figures, not doodles to pass the time until the rain stopped. These were meant to show respect, even awe. Ochre, hematite, and manganese were used alone, or diluted or mixed with other substances, to produce varying shades of skin tones. These Stone Age artists put much thought into the images they wanted to create with the color palette and canvas at their disposal. If the image alone didn’t reflect enough respect for the animals, it was further enhanced and given lifelike qualities by the artist’s use of rippling rock wall contours to add heft, some muscular definition, to the paintings.
That idolization of, and reliance upon, bison came to North America with those humans who walked from Asia east to the continent. As in the old world, in the new one the beasts were hunted for food and shelter, clothing and fuel, even ornamentation. Evolving societies of native cultures were nothing if not inventive and practiced at finding what they needed. Bison hides were scraped clean of fat and muscle to become tepees and robes. They were stretched over curved tree limbs to form bull boats that could be paddled across a river. Bison ribs became runners for winter sleds, while sinews launched arrows from bows or served as thread. And, of course, the meat was about the richest protein around.
But bison were more than sustenance and shelter. Great Plains people viewed them almost as deities, and perhaps rightfully so, considering not only their sheer bulk and demeanor but also the reliance on them and their cultural significance. Bison were mythical, practical, spiritual, and transformative animals. Black Elk held bison in particular regard. Born shortly before the end of the Civil War, this Oglala Sioux holy man fell sick when he was nine years old and lingered for several days in a semiconscious state. During that period, he had a vision in which he was taken to the center of the Lakota world and instructed on the keys of earthly unity. “I was seeing in a sacred manner the