Are you fed up with pretentious city people looking at nature through rose-colored glasses? Do you think all those meditation-obsessed wannabe hippies need to be reminded that the REAL world is a bloody struggle for survival?
…if your answer is “no”, then, like me, you might find the early parts of this book a bit tedious. It moves slowly and the characters are caricatures.
This quote sums up the theme of the book pretty well:
Do you know that more people are hurt by bison in North America than by sharks all over the world? Do you know why? Because they try to ride them. Tourists from New York or Tokyo, whatever urban bubble, literally try to jump on the buffaloes’ backs. Feed them, hug them, take selfies with them. They think they’re at a petting zoo, or in a Disney movie. They’ve never learned the real rules, so they think they can just make up their own.1
Is that actually true? For sharks, Wikipedia says: “Every year, around 80 unprovoked attacks are reported worldwide.” If you try to look up how many people are hurt by bison each year, it’s hard to find national statistics—all I can find are statistics for Yellowstone specifically, and the most rigorous-looking source I can find seems to cut off in the year 2015, but a 2024 NYT article says that “[o]n average, there are one to two reported incidents of bison injuring visitors annually.” Even if we double that to 4, the only way the book’s claim could be true is if Yellowstone accounts for a mere 5% of yearly bison attacks in the US. If that were so, I’d think it’d be easier to find information on those attacks, but who knows. Anyway, even if bison were injuring—or even killing—a hundred people each year, in a country of 333 million people that’s hardly evidence of some cultural epidemic of naivety. (Yeah, yeah, it’s just a novel, I know.)
Total tangent: I tried asking Claude and ChatGPT to fact-check the above claim too.
All that aside, the book is pretty entertaining once the action gets going.