Moving In for the Kill With Montana’s Buffalo Hunters

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

The normally chatty 50-year-old crouches behind a cluster of juniper trees and puts a finger to his lips. The four men behind him fall mute. Vader lies on his belly, points his rifle at the biggest bull and becomes part of a contentious experiment in controlling 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 quarry belong to a herd of 4,000 that roams freely in Yellowstone National Park, where hunting is banned. But winter snows chase them across the park boundaries into southern Montana, where they are not welcome.

The buffalo can carry brucellosis, a disease that causes cows to miscarry 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 an alternative 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 will 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 who shot a buffalo the same day Vader was chasing one.

Environmentalists agree -- to a point. They have long decried the way Montana treats the 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 convert people like Vader to his cause, hoping to strengthen the alliance of environmental and hunting groups across the West that has helped preserve habitat for waterfowl and elk.

His group shadows the buffalo hunters, carrying an odd combination of recruiting brochures and objections -- they still oppose the hunt, arguing that it is “canned” because the buffalo are being treated like domestic animals in Montana, confined to a few thousand acres.

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

Buffalo, also known as 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 herds 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 which ones they could shoot. They’d even provide 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.”

Even so, some hunters have been able to drive up and stand near the road to shoot the buffalo. Others have chased the animals, or, after wounding one, stalked it for miles to finish it off.

The governor acknowledged that buffalo would never be as difficult to hunt as more 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 is also trying to persuade Yellowstone-area ranchers who have small herds of cows to move them so the buffalo can roam more freely in the state. That would end the need for the systematic herding of bison 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. Pictures of the mishap, taken by Mease’s group, were splashed across newspapers over the weekend.

Vader sits down, bleary-eyed. As he drains his Styrofoam coffee cup, he confesses that he was up all night, powered by a mix of anxiety and anticipation.

Neither Vader nor his brother David, who drove up from Denver, have hunted anything on the scale of a buffalo before. Jeff Vader shot a grizzly bear in Alaska 20 years ago, but now he spends his time chasing elk and deer. Like most buffalo hunters, they savor its meat and relish the chance to stalk a creature that has rarely been legal to hunt.

The party sets out in two pickups before sunrise, veering onto dirt roads that rise onto the sagebrush plateaus where the buffalo roam. George Stirner, a grizzled outdoorsman whom the group often looks to for guidance, talks about the joys 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 most other wild animals.

The hunters soon spot several buffalo but move on because two other hunters are watching the animals. Vader stops in front of a second cluster.

Regulations prevent the hunters from firing over the road, so they pour out of their trucks and scale ridges to circle the animals. But the buffalo wander off. Two big ones tramp up one ridge. The hunters follow, and Jeff Vader carefully 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.

Vader rises. “Our first lesson in hunting buffalo,” he says with a smile. “They spook.”

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

When the buffalo cross into private land, the hunters decide to look elsewhere; they drive farther down the road until they spot another group in a picture-perfect setting. The 13 buffalo are strung out on a high plateau rimmed with scattered mountain cedar and juniper. Looming behind them is the snowcapped 10,969-foot Electric Peak, and a wall of other serrated mountains that form the northern boundary of Yellowstone.

The party splits. Two circle around to a rise at the north side of the plateau to drive the buffalo closer to Vader. He and Stirner inch down the hillside and position themselves behind a boulder, waiting for the buffalo to pass by. The bison begin to move toward Vader, spreading out in single file. The silence of the morning is shattered by the roar of the rifle, and a bull in the middle of the herd collapses, then rolls over on its side, legs twitching for a moment. Then the animal is still.

Vader climbs back up the incline to where the rest of the party is waiting. “Not a record, but he’ll be good eating,” he says. “Cabernet Franc, you think?”

“Definitely a red,” David Vader answers.

But the hunters’ work has just begun. Hollering, snapping tarps and honking the pickups’ horns, they slowly push back the other buffalo. They spend three hours skinning the massive carcass and carving 500 pounds of edible flesh from its bones. The men haul the meat back to the trucks in sleds. “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 Buffalo Trace Kentucky Bourbon and marvel at the pile of bones, suitcase-sized lungs and other organs that they leave on the plateau for coyotes and ravens. It’s been more than six hours since the hunt began, and the men turn 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, some falling less than 100 yards from one another. The Buffalo Field Campaign workers had tracked down the other hunting parties and lobbied them to push for more habitat for the bison. But they never came across Jeff Vader’s party.

Vader saw nothing wrong with the hunt -- he was proud he followed regulations and treated the animals with respect. But the experience strengthened his belief that buffalo should have more space to roam and that hunting is the most humane and environmentally sensitive way to control their habitat.

Vader starts following the buffalo controversy more closely once he returns to his home in Helena. He complains to co-workers at the state lottery warehouse 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.’ ”