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Wild Buffalo Make a Comeback on the Canadian Plains

Herds are returning to lands they haven’t roamed in generations

In one of my first memories, we are driving in the Canadian Rockies in winter. Thick beds of cloud congeal in mountain cirques, mingling with the snowpack, white on white swirling together like a witch’s cauldron. The sun is a weak orange furze behind swaddling layers of a dirty blanket sky. Snow slants across the highway: hard needles of ice causing the red taillights of the cars ahead to bleed in the fading light.

Driving in a blizzard is a lonely experience, regardless of how many people are in the car. We are quiet except for the trundling cough of the heater and my dad’s quiet, under-breath humming. It’s a habit that shows up when he’s performing difficult tasks requiring concentration. It’s a habit I’ve adopted.

Eventually, we pull into a rest stop and wait for the storm to blow over. The car is buffeted by wind, rocking creakily on old suspension. Out the window, there is a high fence. Beyond it, in the blur of wind and snow, something large and dark is moving toward the car. It comes closer, shaggy and brown, with an expansive head and wood-carved face staring benignly into the storm. Its shape forms into a word on my tongue: buffalo.

Or bison, if you prefer. Which do you like more? The closed, thudding double syllable of “bison” or the hills and valleys, the open “oh,” of buffalo? Both are impositions; neither is the name used by the people who’ve lived alongside these animals for 10,000 years or more. Neither fits, not totally. “Bison” feels cold, clinical. “Buffalo” requires sharing with an altogether separate group of animals, the snobbishly titled true buffalo: African buffalo, anoas, water buffalo.

The Banff Buffalo Paddock has used both “bison” and “buffalo,” alternating over time. Bordered by Forty Mile Creek, the Cascade River, and the Canadian Pacific Railway, the paddock was 300 acres of mixed grassland, a patch of prairie squatting like a pearl in the sharp shell of a mountain valley. From 1897 to 2015, the paddock held a collection of buffalo: as few as three and as many as a hundred. The first were gifts from the regional aristocrat Donald Smith, better known as Lord Strathcona.

Strathcona had his fingers in just about every Canadian colonial pie: shareholder of the Hudson’s Bay Company, president of the Bank of Montreal, co-founder of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Fort Smith, where we set off on our journey upriver, is named after him. It’s hard to escape him in Western Canada.

Someone dumped the buffalo on him as a gift. Perhaps he looked at the big animals on his doorstep and asked: What am I supposed to do with these? He palmed them off on the town of Banff, where they were housed temporarily in a Royal Canadian Mounted Police barracks. In 1897, the paddock was built, and it was there that I first saw buffalo as a boy.

Blackfoot stories speak of the world as created by Napi, the Old Man, who ensured that the plains were well stocked with game and that everything existed in its proper place. Settlers marvelled at flocks of birds that blotted out the sun and the herds of buffalo whose migrations raised dust clouds almost large enough to seem like their own weather system. An account from an American army colonel in 1871 tells of a buffalo herd so large that it took five days to ride through on horseback. Buffalo derailed trains, barrelled through fences, and stood steady and implacable, unnerving settlers with their stares.

In the short film Four Faces of the Moon, Michif filmmaker Amanda Strong depicts those same stares as her stop-motion buffalo confront hide hunters. The buffalo array themselves in ranks, hundreds of them, their bodies merging into one uncountable, unknowable mass that extends far beyond sight, beyond the horizon, melding into land and sky. This is the land that was.

One August, half a world away, I caught the tail end of the biological phenomenon known colloquially as the Great Migration as it passed through the western corridor of Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. Regularly ranked as one of the natural wonders of the world, the Great Migration is the seasonal movement of millions of wildebeest from their nursery grounds near the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania to fresh grassland feeding grounds in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, hundreds of kilometres to the north.

The impossibly vast columns of grey-brown animals—supposedly visible from space—sweep across East Africa’s plains like the hands of a clock, circumscribing an immense circle over the course of a year. It is a constant, perpetual movement millions of years in the making and surely one of the greatest spectacles on the planet.

While I cherish the memory of that experience, I shouldn’t have had........

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