Bison hunting: where wind is born

Published 9:30 pm Monday, March 1, 2021

Knelt down in the sandy soil next to a bison, before the good hard work begins, one cannot help but to run fingers through the rich wool. Silky soft. In February and March, the woolly “down” of the bison is at its longest. There is no finer robe.

At once, a person marvels at the great store of meat, the uses of hide and the fiber, and on the hoof, its superior fitness for the plains.

The Lakota called it tatanka. To the Shoshone, it was bozheena. The Blackfeet called it real food.

Through the Sand Hills of Nebraska, even the roads are built on the buffalo trails because over thousands of years the animals found the best ways to water, food and shelter.

The near extermination of the buffalo accelerated in the years after the Civil War. Settlement, railroads, market hunting and disease, coincident with military policy, took its toll; the great northern herd seemed to vanish first.

A few names are legend, the saviors of the great beasts: Samuel Walking Coyote, Charles Allard, Michel Pablo, Buffalo Jones and Charles Goodnight, who founded small private herds from orphaned calves. By 1902, the Yellowstone herd was started with 18 bison.

Today there are close to 500,000 bison on the hoof in the United States and Canada. Herds in various states and provinces ensure the survivability of the species. Even today a handful of men and women preserve bison on reservations, refuges and ranches.

In the tradition of Goodnight, Jones and Walking Coyote, is John Howell, a former NFL safety who played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Seattle Seahawks. When his football career was over, he went back to his hometown in the Sand Hills, back to the Dismal River.

For 25 years, Howell’s bison, close to 200 animals, have had the run of a preserve on the banks of the Dismal River. To keep from exceeding the carrying capacity of the land, a few bison are harvested each year.

When we spotted a small group of animals silhouetted on the spine of a ridge, we parked the truck out of sight. It was the first of several stalks. My friend Tracy Wilson carried a bolt-action 33 Nosler and on the third stalk we identified a large bull on the edge of the herd.

Ahead of me, Wilson and Howell sprawled on the edge of a buffalo wallow and Wilson made a rest for the rifle out of a backpack. The wind blew at 25 mph. The distance to the big bull, 125 yards. The animals were close. When a calf cleared the bull, the animal turned and gave Wilson the shot he needed.

Up on the ridge, a zephyr blew my hat off. “This is the place where wind is born,” Howell said.

Buffalo pay their way on Howell’s ranch. For most of the year they are left alone, but in the winter when their coats are rich, when the meat can be harvested without spoilage, Howell guides a few hunters in the chase and the stalk.

For a few minutes we marveled at the animal that lay before us and then the work began. For the rest of the afternoon, the outfitter and his guides skinned and prepared the meat for butchering.

In the morning we returned with a Choctaw warrior on his first bison hunt. Tray Ardese grew up in Oklahoma and spent 25 years in the Marine Corps. This veteran of seven combat tours said his lifelong dream was to harvest a bison.

We crossed the Dismal on a frosty morning, and found a herd on a bench between groves of cedars.

On our bellies, we slithered through coarse grass and prickly pear on hands and knees, down into the shade of a cedar. Several stalks showed glimpses of young bulls and dry cows, but with no shot opportunities where the target animal was not screened away by a calf.

When 58 pairs of eyes turned on four two-leggers, they bunched up, milled around then lined out for the horizon.

Two hours later we stalked the herd again, down through a narrow canyon, to a patch of cedars and cottonwoods. The bison began to stream uphill along an ancient trail.

Ardese cocked an ear to his guide, a former NFL great. In our huddle, Howell called the play.

“There, that’s a good young bull. No, he has a calf in front of him now. Shift. That one, at the back of the herd, it doesn’t have a calf. That one.” And the crack of the rifle was in the wind and one animal lifted its tail and made its final run.

Howell recalled tripping over a stone in the middle of a buffalo wallow. He dug out an ancient tool, blunt on one side and pointed on the other, with a groove for a leather strap to hold the head to a chunk of cottonwood.

“There are no stones here in the Sand Hills,” Howell said, “unless they were brought here.”

Back at the ranch, he unwrapped the smoothed and shaped stone. I traced the worked groove with a fingertip, imagined its heft on a shaft. Rather than a war club, it was probably used to crack buffalo bones for the marrow. Someone, Ogalalla, Cheyenne or Arapaho, had carried that thing from a long way off — out here to the Sand Hills to the place where wind is born.

Most anglers don’t fish their nymphs deep enough. The beadhead and copper wire body helps this one get down fast.

The Casino Royale, a creation of fly designer Robert Maldonado, is a combination of the Prince Nymph and the Copper John, combining the effectiveness of the contrasting biots with the copper sparkle. It’s a hybrid mayfly nymph that can fish year-round and comes in three colors: red, copper and chartreuse.

Fish this pattern dead-drift beneath a foam-bodied dry or use it in tandem with another beadhead nymph, high-sticking, watch the leader. Buy it or tie it, the Casino Royale will most likely outfish Pheasant Tails and Prince Nymphs, especially in hard-fished waters.

Tie this one on a No. 8-14 nymph hook. Slide a tungsten or black nickel bead up against the eye. Tie in two ginger goose biots for the tail. For the body, use peacock herl separated by red wire. Craft the underwing with two white biots (tied in under the peacock herl). Finish with two white biots for the wing.

—Gary Lewis, for The Bulletin