NEVER MIND HOT DOGS and apple pie; the true American meal is buffalo meat. When I was a kid in western Michigan, I was obsessed with old stories about the nomadic Native American hunters of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, who traveled constantly in search of the animals, which numbered somewhere between 30 million and 60 million in the early 19th century. The hunters roasted buffalo tongues over burning buffalo chips, styled their hair with buffalo marrow,

As a kid, I built "buffalo hide" tents out of twigs and leaves, and cooked chipmunks over open fires, pretending I was roasting a rack of bu¤alo ribs. That I was born after the passing of America's wild bu¤alo felt like a mistake of the gods.

waterproofed their moccasins with buffalo fat, sipped the digestive fluids from buffalo stomachs out of buffalo-horn ladles, and sat in buffalo-hide lodges while sewing undergarments from the skins of buffalo calves. I spent my childhood days in the woods, making desperate attempts to replicate that life. I built "buffalo hide" tents out of twigs and leaves, and cooked chipmunks on spits over open fires while pretending I was roasting a rack of buffalo ribs. That I was born after the passing of America's wild buffalo herds felt like some cosmic error, a mistake of the gods.

In 1996, when I finished college, I moved to Missoula, Montana. For someone who prefers free-range wild game to the hormone-injected, factory-slaughtered creatures sold in grocery stores, the place was paradise. I hunted mule deer, elk, antelope, and black bear and taught myself how to turn game meat into just about any product you can buy from a high-end delicatessen. I spent several months each year in the wild, often embarking into the mountains on meat-hunting trips that my girlfriend considered insane. To me, there was nothing more fulfilling than testing my skills in a wilderness setting that could provide sustenance to those who were willing to go all the way. But I could never shake my childhood longing to hunt a buffalo.

The past 125 years notwithstanding, humans have stalked wild buffalo upon the North American landscape for the past dozen or so millennia. But in the years following the Civil War, when there was an insatiable market for buffalo hides, the animals were slaughtered by European-American and indig-enous hunters with astonishing swiftness. By 1885, fewer than a thousand remained. Thanks to captive breeding programs on private ranches and federal parklands, nearly 500,000 buffalo now live in North America. While the buffalo survived extinction, these days it faces the grim fate of domestication. About 96 percent of modern buffalo are domesticated animals living on private ranches and game farms. Wannabe hunters, eager to live out the ancient ritual of a buffalo hunt, pay to kill these animals on fenced pastures (taking down a mature bull at Ted Turner's Flying D Ranch, in southwestern Montana, costs about $4,000), but these guaranteed-success hunts require the skill it takes to gun down a dairy cow. The bulk of the remaining 4 percent, fewer than 20,000 buffalo, live on parkland in the western U.S. and Canada.

As a hunter who adheres to a fair-chase ethic, I always assumed that my chances of hunting a truly wild buffalo were, well, extinct. But a couple of years ago, I learned that I was simply looking in the wrong place. My brother Danny, a 34-year-old freshwater ecologist, moved from Alabama to Anchorage for a job at the University of Alaska. As he explored his new home state, he reported rumors about a wild herd of buffalo living in the Wrangell–St. Elias.

In 1950, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service relocated 17 semi-tame buffalo from the town of Delta Junction, Alaska, to a remote area in the heavily forested valley of the upper Copper River, where there would be no human influence on their movements and migrations. The herd ranged across hundreds of square miles of wilderness. The population expanded, and though it fluctuates periodically, it now stands at around 125 wild and free individuals—enough to allow the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to institute a limited hunt.

When I drew a permit, it was like getting my own dream in the mail.