<strong>Amazon Best of the Month, December 2008</strong>: Before the 18th century, the American buffalo was the largest land mammal in North America, largely predator-free and roaming the continent in numbers estimated in excess of 40 million. In just over a century, widespread slaughter reduced the population to a few hundred head, and the American West lay beneath a till of bleached bones. When Steven Rinella stumbled over a buffalo skull in Yellowstone National Park, it sparked an obsessive search for the beast's past, from its migration across the Bering land bridge to its near extinction at the hands of western settlers. <em>American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon</em> is his fascinating chronicle, beginning with a search for Black Diamond (the doomed model for the Buffalo Nickel) and including an exploration of "buffalo jumps" (where thousands were run over cliffs by Native American hunters), and tales of bone piles--harvested from the plains for a thriving fertilizer industry--stacked 10 feet high, 20 feet wide, and a half-mile long. Rinella's history is deftly interwoven with his own literal buffalo hunt in Alaska's Wrangell mountains, complete with grizzly bears, raging, ice-rimmed rivers, and bouts of hypothermia and frostbite. Written in a spare style appropriate to the rigors of the frozen wilderness, <em>American Buffalo</em> is engrossing, informative, funny, and a welcome achievement of both natural history and outdoor adventure. --Jon Foro</em> Steven Rinella http://lakenet.llcoop.org/search~S1/?searchtype=i&searcharg=9780385521680&searchscope=1&sortdropdown=-&SORT=D&extended=1&SUBMIT=Search&searchlimits=&searchorigarg=i9780805087871 2009-01-14T15:01:24-05:00 A correspondent for "Outside" magazine details his participation in a hunt for American bison in the Alaskan wilderness while reflecting on the history of the buffalo and the future of an animal that has haunted the American imagination. 3934 9780385521680