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Bruce: Five, four, three, two, one. Welcome to another edition of Whitetail Rendezvous. This is your host, Bruce Hutcheon, and I can just tell you folks I’m sitting on the Green Bay and the wind’s coming out of the north and we’ve got waves breaking on the breakwater, but that’s not going to stop me from heading out west to Oregon. I’m just pleased, so pleased and happy to have Scott Haugen on the show today. Scott, say hello to the folks.
Scott: Hello, everyone. Thank you for inviting me, and I can just feel that I’m right there with you in Colorado Springs.
Bruce: Now Scott’s been an outdoor writer and still is. He’s written over 20 books. He was a teacher up in Alaska at one time in the past, global hunter, and TV host. Scott, let’s just talk about your time. Just take a couple of minutes with Inuits up in Alaska. Just share with us some of those rich stories that you brought back from there.
Scott: Oh, wow, it was just an amazing place. I grew up in Oregon. My wife grew up in Oregon. We knew each other from first grade on. I went to the University of Oregon and got my degree. She went to Oregon State. We didn’t see each other for about four or five years. We both graduated with teaching degrees. I saw her after we graduated, she said, “What are you going to do with your teaching degree?” I said, “I want to head north to Alaska and hang with the Inupiat Eskimos and just see how they hunt and fish.” I grew up in a hunting and fishing family. I did a lot of trapping and she said, “Well, gosh you’d be crazy not to do it right now while you’re young right out of college because you’ll never find a woman to go up there with you.” Four months later we were engaged and nine months later we were married and living up in Alaska. So it was a good start. That was 25 years ago this July here, July 21.
So it’s been fun and it really hasn’t slowed down since. It was just an amazing place to be a part of. I ran a trap line down here growing up. I started that in the fourth grade, trapping fox and bobcat and coyote and beaver and raccoons and to go up there and trap wolf and wolverine and lynx in 40, 50, 60 below 0 temperatures and just even keep traps operational and learn where to trap when you’re up there in the tundra. It’s like the moon basically. You’re 200 miles from any trees, 24 hours of total darkness, and checking traps in those situations during the winter months. Then the hunting, I learned so much from the Inupiat people from the hunting, the bird hunting and caribou and moose and we lived in two different villages. One was Point Lay on the Northwest Arctic Coast, a village of less than 100 people and I was the high school teacher, taught ninth through 12th grade, every subject there. And then we moved to a place called Anaktuvuk Pass, which is the heart of the Brooks Range on the North Slope of Alaska and that was wildlife haven there. We would watch Dall sheep, and Grizzly bear and moose literally from our living room window and they were the last people, the last indigenous people to settle down in all of North America – the U.S. and Canada.
They didn’t become established until 60s there and that was when a lot of the people saw their first white man, and they were just an amazing culture. It’s what a lot of us dreamed of being born into a culture like that where your life revolves around hunting and fishing and the outdoors. It was a little more extreme though than what a lot of people might think. Up there if the animals don’t show up you could die. The 60 below temperature weather and bad storms kick up. You don’t have a heated house to go in, so there was a lot of hardship, a lot of trails, a lot of tribulations through the stories that I heard from those people, but the neat thing about it end is it all revolves around family. They lived and died together. They worked hard together. They experienced loss together and that’s what the outdoors is all about and that’s what we try to advocate and what we do because it’s part of our culture we just feel that’s slipping away.
Bruce: Now, Scott, I heard about you from, and I’m going to give a shout-out here to Center of the Nation, Guy and Shanna Howell, up in the northeast corner of Wyoming. And they shared with me some your thoughts about the hunting tradition and where yours really came from. So share with our listeners about your hunting tradition from your family.
Scott: Well, like a lot of families in America, we have deep roots. My earliest hunting memories were being out with my dad and both of my granddads, they all had… we live in Western Oregon on the west side of the Cascades. We’re a half hour from Eugene and this black tail deer country, Columbia black-tailed deer, and Roosevelt Elk and we have a lot of bear around here too. So I’ve been blessed to hunt many parts of the world, but these, I think, are some of the toughest animals to consistently hunt. To put meat in the freezer is very difficult. So that’s what I grew up hunting and doing that to be successful required us to develop hunting skills and working hard and doing that as a family. I remember literally being carried into the woods on my granddad’s shoulders and standing by my dad when I was four years old when he would shoot a deer and helping him in the whole entire process, and we’ve carried that over to our children. My wife is, gosh, fifth generation in this area now and to see photos from her family from the 1850s, 1860s, hunting in the same area that we hunt today, it’s pretty humbling to see how far it’s gone. But, basically, it’s the hunting and fishing and trapping that built this culture where we live right now.
Unfortunately, a lot of people who call this little valley home aren’t really aware of that and for us the hunting was family. That’s what it was about. Sure we were out to hunt and get meat and have fun out there in the field, but everything revolved around working together from preparing for the hunt to hunting together to butchering the animal to reflecting on the good times every time you sit down for a meal with that animal. That’s what we’ve carried over to our boys today was we don’t buy meat. We’re fortunate because we’re in the hunting industry. We get a lot of wild game and birds and fish and so forth, but literally about every meal we eat every day, three meals a day is some type of wild game, seafood, whatever it is. And to teach the kids how to do the things that are necessary to put the food on the table like that and appreciate and respect the outdoors, it builds a very strong, stable family relationship. It’s a lot of hard work, but that’s what we’re about. We do all of our own butchering. We don’t take our meat in and, again, that’s family time. It takes a long time to butcher an elk, and I rather sit down at the table with my family for four or five hours and talk and butcher an elk than take it to someone else and miss that family time together. It’s a lot of fun opportunities.
Bruce: Let’s give a shout-out to Tiffany, you were sharing in the warm-up, Scott, about her notoriety with her cookbooks and her wild game cooking, so take just 30 seconds or so and give a shout-out for Tiffany.