HELENA, Mont. (AP) -- A bison activist group and the U.S. Forest Service are at odds over the relevance of a cache of documents on a $13 million land deal north of Yellowstone National Park.

The Buffalo Field Campaign alleges Gallatin National Forest officials intentionally removed several hundreds pages of records on the 1999 agreement it had sought under a Freedom of Information Act request. The group wants to study the effect of the deal on area bison herds.

Gallatin National Forest officials maintain the records in question were old or duplicate documents and were removed as part of agency-wide housekeeping efforts.

"They weren't anything that was relevant to what we're doing at this point," forest spokeswoman Lorette Ray in Bozeman said.

Ray said forest officials were crafting a response and denied any wrongdoing.

"We weren't trying to hide anything," she said. "We were very up front by telling them we were doing this."

The 7,000-acre deal, involving public and private land, was brokered as a way to preserve wildlife habitat and protect park bison that wander into Montana each winter in search for forage. Bison that can't be herded back into the park are captured under a joint state-federal management plan, and those animals that test positive for brucellosis are sent to slaughter. The Buffalo Field Campaign opposes the management plan.

Dan Brister, the bison group's project coordinator, said Gallatin officials have stonewalled queries for information on the land deal. Following the FOIA request, forest officials provided a file on the land agreement in March, but told the group several documents deemed irrelevant had been removed for "recycling," he said.

"I was shocked at the response because we'd been asking for these records since June of last year," campaign member Darrell Geist said. "They blocked our access ... and used that time to go through project files."

Amy Atwood, an attorney for the Western Environmental Law Center in Eugene, Ore., said forest officials might have violated the Federal Records Act if they intentionally removed or destroyed the documents.

"I'm not willing to say there are clear violations here, but at a minimum they have some explaining to do," she said. "It doesn't look good, especially since the records were the subject of a FOIA request."

Atwood and Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., have asked Gallatin National Forest Supervisor Becki Heath for an explanation and retrieval of the records, but had received no response as of Tuesday. Atwood said the group was "exploring its options," including litigation.

"This was a $13 million land agreement to protect wildlife and the Forest Service has a public trust responsibility to show how they're monitoring the agreement, how they're implementing it and how the native wildlife are benefiting," Geist said.

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