A late winter morning last March. A dawn sky you see only in Alaska, silvered as the inside of a mussel shell, light brushing the snowy peaks of the Chugach Mountains but not yet warming the boggy pasture where the bison stand. They are large, stoic animals, their wide, bearded faces impassive. Or, you think, ruminative, because they are of course ruminants, a few of them browsing the hay bales that have been stacked in the mud for them. Their thick coats are the brown-black of cocoa beans, of a shag carpet left over from the 1970s. Bison breath steams the cold morning air.
Now, all around them, rises a rush of motorized activity: semitrucks and forklifts, government agency pickups and satellite dish–sprouting vans from Anchorage TV. And people: bison…
