Pro Hunter Pursues Buffalo in South Dakota
By Mark Watson, Black Hills Pioneer-December 26, 2005
BUFFALO - As depicted in the movie "Dances With Wolves", which was filmed partially in this region, Indians hunted buffalo on horses with often nothing more than a stick bow.
Trying to partially relive those days by killing a buffalo using nothing but a bow was Scott Haugen, a professional hunter from near Eugene, Ore., while hunting the Jump Off Buffalo Ranch. "I've hunted them before," Haugen said. "But we were really wanting to shoot a TV show that depicted the way that the bison were hunted in past history.
He added that the property he was hunting on, just south of Buffalo, S.D., was private and the buffalo were not free-roaming so not technically a fair-chase hunt but it was just about as close to a fair-chase hunt as could be as the ranch is an 8,500 acre ranch.
"There are two ways you can hunt a bison," he said. "You can hunt them out in the wild, the free ranging animals, but it is easier to draw some sheep tags (which are notorious for being extremely tough to draw) than it is to draw bison tags. Then the other way is on private property. That can be interesting because sometimes the animals are fairly domesticated and it isn't something that you would want to show on TV. That's something that we didn't want to do. We wanted a real hunt, for the show and wanted to do the whole hunt justice."
Just what the hunter had in store for filming was something that none of the crew suspected. "Even when we got out there looking at the land ... I though this would be a slam-dunk deal," he said. "But we didn't even see a bison until after noon and we started at daylight." Shortly after 3 p.m. the first day out Haugen said the crew saw a buffalo that they wanted to go after. "He was about 600 yards out, and as soon as he saw us he took off," he said.
One of his guides ran his horse to the top of a ridge to spot where the bull had traveled to, he said. He thought the buffalo would drop down into a draw to get out of sight, but when the guide spotted the buffalo it was about a mile away, still running. About an hour later Haugen said the hunting party traveled into a group of draws where they found three bulls together. They made a stalk and Haugen was able to make his shot at 50 yards. "We got the whole thing on film," he said. "It was pretty impressive."
The buffalo marked his 21st bow-killed animal this year while filming for three different television hunting shows. There is more to producing a hunting show than meets the eye, he said. Offers from all over the world come Haugen's way. Background checks on outfitters need to be conducted, references need to be contacted and everything needs to "come together." "It needs to be something unique," he said. "And bison hunting has really stepped up in popularity the last few years. It's one of the fastest-growing big game animals that people are seeking."
The ranch near Buffalo wasn't the only one offering Haugen a buffalo hunt, he said. Four others offered a hunt, but he said he declined each because it wasn't "just right for what we wanted to accomplish."
Then the offer to hunt the Jump Off Buffalo Ranch came, he said.
"It was perfect," he said. "It even surpassed my expectations ... It was a classic hunt. The people were top notch, I would recommend it to anyone." Unlike a previous invite, he said this hunt was real. "I was invited on a bison hunt last year and I couldn't make it," he said. "I was going to go with a group of four guys then I would go the next week. They were told that they would be on a 10,000-acre ranch and the animals were wild and it would be a tough hunt. They went over there and at the end of the first day they called me and said 'you don't want to do this.' They drove out in a truck and the animals wouldn't leave the feeding area. In fact a couple of the guys didn't even shoot anything because it wasn't what they were looking for."
The same was not true on the recent hunt, he said. "We didn't even see a fence and the bison were really difficult to approach.
"It was just a real exciting hunt," he added. "Getting that close to an animal that weighed more than a ton with a bow, those big animals when you're up close to them, you feel kind of helpless." Haugen, a former high school science teacher, began his professional hunting career while living in Alaska. While living in Eskimo villages he hunted for the meat that would sustain his family. In 1990 he killed a man-eating polar bear, he said. "I tracked him down in 42 below (zero temperatures) and found the body and killed the bear," he said. "That made world news immediately. I got a lot of press off of that. At that point I thought it would be kind of neat to do some outdoor writing. That was the first article that I wrote."
Throughout the next seven years, he said he and his wife traveled the world getting stories and finally moved to Indonesia where they began teaching on the island of Sumatra. "I figured that maybe now was the time to start writing all these articles," he said. "So I began to write and got really good responses from a few different magazines, and before I knew it I was writing my first book."
He said his first television show was for Cabela's, where he served as the guest host for a fishing show. Since then, he began making appearances on various shows and now hosts three different TV programs.
And for each episode of each show, the amount of planning, preparation and just filming can be mind-boggling. "We shot about three and a half hours of tape that day," he said. "That will give us our 22 minutes of air time. A lot of that wasn't live bison footage. The terrain was so beautiful, we saw quite a few mule deer. There was just a lot of neat aspects like with the horses. It felt like things went together really well as far as capturing the story. You just don't go out and shoot one of these (episodes.)
"A lot of shows, you are out there and it just feels very choppy and you don't know how you are going to flow it together once you get to the editing table," he said. "But this one seemed to flow very naturally." Haugen said he is lucky enough to be able to hunt for a living and to share his experiences with others, and fortunately, it never gets old."The day I come up on an animal and don't have that adrenaline rush where I'm not shaking as I settle the crosshairs or steady my bow sights on him, that's the day I quit," he said.
"It's a deep passion. I've hunted for more than 35 years and I feel privileged and blessed to be in a situation where I can hunt and write for a living."
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