William Woolfitt
Abduct
A group of Mbuti people trusted Harry Johnston after he rescued them from a German kidnapper who had captured them in the forest and wanted them to perform at fairs. The Mbuti visited Johnston, the high commissioner of Uganda, at his bungalow, and told him about animals they knew, and assured him that of course the o’api was real.
Bullet
William Temple Hornaday knew that the buffalo were vanishing, that the Indians who had depended on them were starving. In 1886 he went to Montana to collect buffalo skins and bones for the National Museum. He shot an old bull that might have weighed 1600 pounds. The old bull had been shot before; while skinning him on the snowy ground, Hornaday found three bullets lodged in his body, another embedded in his spine.
Cherokee Lake
To restore the whitetail deer populations of eastern Tennessee, the biologist rounds up some of the seed stock: deer who have been confined to islands in Cherokee Lake. His hounds drive the deer into the water, where catchers wrestle with the deer, subdue them, sling them into boats.
Dream
The Mbuti guided Johnston into the dense Semliki forest, where he endured the heat, the steam, the shadows because he dreamed of seeing a unicorn.
Expressed in Millions
In his report for the museum, Hornaday wrote that the Great Plains had been one vast buffalo range, inhabited by millions of buffaloes. They lived and moved in great multitudes, like grand armies in review, covering scores of square miles at once. They were so numerous they stopped boats in the rivers, threatened to overwhelm travelers, and derailed locomotives and train cars.
Flood
In the late nineteenth century, whitetail deer were vanishing too. Market hunters with repeating rifles killed thousands of deer, filled refrigerator cars with fresh meat. According to Richard and Thomas McCabe, trains that ran across whitetail range [contributed to] the species’ demise. By rail, millions of immigrants flooded the continent’s interior, and millions of pounds of deer hides and venison were drained out.
Gullible
The Mbuti told Johnston o’api was a better name for the animal he wanted to find, o’api was a word they had learned from the Mbuba people; Johnston had been calling it atti, a name used by his friend Henry Stanley. The Mbuti found the o’api’s cloven-hoofed prints in the mud and showed them to Johnston, but he thought the Mbuti trackers were fooling him and told them he would not follow the prints.
Herdswoman
Molly Goodnight gave bottles of milk to buffalo calves orphaned by the market hunters. She had asked Charles, her husband, to rope the orphans for her, lead them home. She rescued two bawling calves, then seven more, another three; she was establishing an ark population on the Goodnights’ ranch in Palo Duro Canyon. Molly and Charles made part of the ranch a refuge.
Involuntary Park
After its human inhabitants were relocated and its towns were abandoned, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone became a kind of accidental animal sanctuary: the numbers of wolves and roe deer and black storks increased. Endangered bison were moved from one part of Belarus to the zone, and they have multiplied too. The animals are radioactive but thriving, Mary Mycio says. She calls it a resurrection.
Johnstoni
The Mbuti told Johnston that they hunted the o’api by pitfall and spear, that it was built like an ass, had some stripes like a zebra, some dark brown parts, and soon Johnston told everyone he was the discoverer of the Okapia johnstoni, although he still had not seen one.
Kiowa
In 1887 the buffalo were almost gone in Indian Territory because the whites would not stop killing them. N. Scott Momaday’s grandmother told him that the Kiowa men traveled to Texas and pleaded with Charles Goodnight until he sold them one from his private herd. They took it home to Rainy Mountain, sacrificed it during the Sun Dance ceremony.
Look Ahead
Hornaday hunted for the museum and also for sport. He admired the whitetail deer’s survival instincts, its heightened senses, its determination to stay alive: time after time the hunter, stealing forward, looks ahead of him and sees far beyond fair rifle shot a flash of white, a cloud swaying between the tree-trunks, the vanishing point of a White-tail deer.
Make a Picture
The Mbuti sold some bandoliers of skin to Johnston, but what he really wanted was someone to photograph the okapi for the first time, and do it fast; he was already worried that British sportsmen who heard about the okapi would come and trample the forest, that trophy collectors would exterminate the okapi.
Nurture
There was also an ark population of buffalo on the Flathead Reservation. According to one story, Samwel Walking Coyote, a Pend d'Oreille Indian, was among the hunters near the Milk River who shot the mother buffalos, saved the calves. In another version, his stepson Latati led orphaned calves over the mountains to the reservation, was affectionate with them, protected and raised them, and was inconsolable when his stepfather sold them to ranchers.
Open Air Sport
In 1887, a writer for the New York Tribune reported that deer were becoming extinct because of pot-hunting, pelt-taking, hounding, fire-lighting, yarding, salt-baiting. According to the report, in Tennessee, parties go out in buckboard wagons and camp in the woods for three or four weeks. With hounds, they drive the deer to the water courses; they send home a great deal of venison.
Particular
The Mbuti said the o’api was too smart for British hunters, they knew the o’api, but Johnston pleaded with them, said that it was urgent, said that he wanted to know what the Mbuti knew, to know the okapi’s exact shape in the flesh.
Quantity
According to Rebecca Solnit, roughly one million buffalo were slaughtered each year in the 1870s. Their meat and fleeces were left to spoil. Their hides were cut into strips, made into drive belts for factories in eastern cities.
Ruminants
Harriette Arnow: Most of the basin of the Cumberland River was a paradise for ruminants. Here, they could find salt licks, grass in the barrens, ferns in the forest. Pea vine flourished. Buffalo, elk, and deer, all abounded.
Skin
When the Mbuti had decided that it was still good for them to help Johnston, they killed an o’api, and took it to the fort, and skinned it for the white officers, who sent the skin to Johnston, who made drawings of it, marveled at its chestnut red tail and purple-black stripes and splodges.
Take Away
Luther Standing Bear: I saw the bodies of hundreds of dead buffalo lying about, just wasting, and the odor was terrible. Outside the white people’s dugouts we saw bale after bale of buffalo skins, all packed, ready for market. These people were taking away the source of the clothing and lodges provided for us by our Creator, and they were letting our food lie on the plains to rot.
Use Everything
Theda Perdue: The Cherokees ate the deer's flesh, tanned the hides with deer brains, wore the skins, made tools and ornaments from bones and antlers, and used sinews for thread and hooves for glue.
Valuable
Through the officers, the Mbuti sent Johnston another o’api skull.
Will Shoot
Exterminate
Hornaday, 1887: There is no kind of warfare against game animals too unfair, too disreputable, or too mean for white men to engage in. They will shoot buffalo and antelope from running railway trains, drive deer into water with hounds and cut their throats in cold blood, kill does with fawns a week old, kill fawns by the score for their spotted skins, slaughter deer, moose, and caribou in the snow at a pitiful disadvantage, just as the wolves do; exterminate the wild ducks on the whole Atlantic seaboard with punt guns for the metropolitan markets; kill off the Rocky Mountain goats for hides worth only 50 cents apiece, destroy wagon loads of trout with dynamite, and so on to the end of the chapter.
Yellowstone
In 1996, livestock agents working for the state of Montana killed more than a thousand hungry buffalo when they dared to follow their migratory instincts, left Yellowstone National Park in search of food. Rosalie Little Thunder drove to Royal Teton Ranch and prayed over the bodies of massacred buffalo, the unborn calf cast aside in the mud; she was jailed for trespassing.
Zero Tolerance Policy
Although cattle have never caught brucellosis from buffalo, Montana isn’t taking any chances. All buffalo found outside Yellowstone may be legally destroyed. Rosalie Little Thunder said, After I am gone, I want there to be buffalo on this Earth. Maybe the buffalo will help us be here a little bit longer. Maybe they will help us survive.