GALLATIN NATIONAL FOREST, Mont. — 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.
