One Heck Of A Ride

21 The Making of a Hunter Chapter 2 Bears: Dangerous And Fascinating Big black bear taken by author in 1980 on his second trip to Marble Mountain. N ot all of my hunting when I was young was with my hunting partners. I sometimes hunted alone. Using a John Wayne commemorative .30-30 Winchester rifle and hunting on foot, I took a small black bear in 1979 on Marble Mountain near California’s Oregon border with a houndsman named Bucky Stone. I liked running after his hounds so much I hunted with Bucky and his pack again in 1980. He had booked bowhunting writer Chuck Adams and me to hunt out of the same camp farther south than where I had hunted the previous year. When Bucky’s brother called to say a hunter had killed a California black bear in the Trinity Alps’ Happy Camp area that weighed 648 pounds on certified scales, and there were other big bears there, we moved to that area and I killed a good bear. (Adams did not take a bear on that hunt.) My bear, which I shot on Christmas Eve, wasn’t weighed, but Bucky estimated it was 375 pounds after field dressing. Its skull measured 19 inches and qualified for the Boone and Crockett Club’s record book. We camped in the open for five nights with the temperatures dropping down to 10ºF every night. It was a tough hunt in rough country, and I loved every minute of it. Whenever I could, I kept returning to help Bucky’s clients take seventeen more bears that year. I learned many of his tricks while helping him and discovered all hunters were not equal. Some guys had to be coaxed to keep going, others simply would give up even though they were in better shape than I was. Others would not stop until a bear was treed or put to bay. It was physically challenging, but I did it because I loved running with the dogs. It cannot be explained to someone who has not done it. Bucky really cared for his hounds, and was a great guy to be around. He eventually quit hunting with dogs, probably because he suffered problems with his back. Over the next four decades, I shot three more black bears when I came across them while hunting caribou or moose in Canada. These were followed by an Alaskan brown bear on one of the Aleutian Islands in 1982, the Kamchatka brown bear I shot during a snow sheep hunt in Russia in 2003, and two grizzly bears in Alaska in 2014. A polar bear was always on my bucket list, but I never got around to hunting one when Americans could import these great white bears. (We still Author enjoyed bear hunting with hounds so much he returned to help the outfitter guide other clients.