Striking the Right Track
By Dennis L. Ingram
A few years back a buddy and I loaded dogs and went for a bear hunt. It was a catch-and-release chase only hunt as neither of us had a harvest tag. Because of space, I only loaded three older hounds and a yearling while my friend brought his three along. He had two hounds that were two and a yearling as well, all of which were out of a cross I’d made from my dogs.
We got on the mountain before daylight and had a bump on bear just before the sun came up, so we decided to try them. I put down Ryan, Ike and Rowen to see whether they’d go to the track. Two of those dogs were probably five years old and the other four. They headed off up the canyon on the run and acted like they knew where the bear track was. After they’d made a few hundred yards we shipped the other four younger hounds.
It wasn’t long and we heard the younger strike and race up the canyon. They all four fell on the wood and were treed on a young bear. So my buddy and I headed that way. We hadn’t made it very far and I could hear my three older dogs trailing off to our left on what sounded like a cold trail. They trailed over the ridge and were soon out of hearing.
We arrived at a large fur tree and found my buddies three dogs and my yearling treed on that young bear. Now I’ll have to tell you I was a little unhappy that my three older bear dogs had left the country and those younger dogs had a bear. I can remember wondering how they were going to save face after letting those younger dogs show them up.
My hunting partner and I drove around several drainages with the receiver tracking those three hounds path. It was early afternoon by the time we had a good beep on them, so we drove that way to pick them up. The treeing switches were all three going off so I figure they must have struck a different bear.
After using up all the two-track roads we could, we got out and began our walk into the hounds. We could hear those three dogs roaring up on a little bench in the pinion trees, and figured they had that bear on the ground. So we threw the two yearlings out to go help. With all my yelling at the pups, the bear heard us coming and started moving again, and without a volume change we knew for sure that the bear had been bayed.
The race lead to our left and over into the first big drainage and stopped when the bear climbed a huge ponderosa tree. We hadn’t seen the track yet and didn’t really know what those three older dogs had struck. But upon approaching the tree I could see one of the largest cinnamon colored boar black bears I’d ever been under. What a brute! Matter fact, he was such a brute I used him on the cover of my Hound Dog Crazy video I did that same fall.
Later my hunting buddy asked me, “My dogs ran right over that boar track didn’t they?”
“Yes,” I responded.
We both realized that those four young dogs of ours did in fact run over the old boar track. He’d probably pasted through in the early evening hours and the younger sow towards morning. Neither of us would have ever know that bear was there had the older dogs struck and taken it out, cause we walked over whatever evidence was there ourselves. It’s common for a young dog to cast over a track and not even appear to know it’s there while an old seasoned hound will find it every time. And earlier in the day I was wondering what excuse I was going if they didn’t have a bear.
(story was published in Full Cry during the fall of 2005)
