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Having read the entire Flume article, I construct in my own mind the following chain of events that appears to be logical from the article.

1) Jeff Hawn has had a problem with Buffalo intruding upon and damaging his property.
2) He has a fence on his property that is in dispute as to legal status, but was incapable of keeping the buffalo out.
3) Hawn had filed civil lawsuit against the principal owners of the buffalo and has received a countersuit.
4) Based upon his ownership of the land and his view of his rights, he invited an organized group to hunt / capture buffalo on his land and provided maps to show boundaries of same.
5) Law Enforcement investigators have found matching characteristics between rifle slug, cartridge casing and a personal rifle of Jeff Hawn.
6) The cartridge was found off of the landowner's property in Forest Service Land.
7) Buffalo carcasses have been found in many locations with majority off his property with death estimates scattered over an indefinite but several week period.
8) At the time of the actual hunt in question Mr Hawn was not at the property, however some of the earlier buffalo kills were clearly visible from his residence.

From this it looks to me that Jeff Hawn became impatient with the course of the lawsuit as his property continued to suffer damage and the buffalo owners could not or would not stop these incursions. He had killed at least 2 buffalo himself and there may be evidence pointing to suspicion of one kill off of his property.
He then opens his property to a non-professional group of hunters to remove the intruding buffalo by death or capture, providing same with property maps. When informed by [telephone?] that more money would be needed by this non-professional group, he responds with a single week timeline before he would hire others to remove the buffalo for a fee.

From the facts presented, it looks like these amateur hunters went 'off reservation' and killed outside the property line. This would probably make Mr Hawn civilly responsible for damages there but I don't see the criminal case for the hunter's actions especially since he was not present for the hunt. If he can be positively tied to making a personal kill off of his property, then under Colorado's 'free range' provisions he may be both civilly and criminally responsible.

In any case this appears to end up being a rather foolish and very expensive exercise on Mr Hawn's part. He will now be facing both criminal and civil proceedings as a 'foreigner' (Texan) in a Colorado Court with local adversaries. It would probably have been cheaper to maintain the document trail of damages for his civil suit already filed.