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Definitely not like beef.  It's got a little more flavor to it.  If you get them out of the corn they are better but what isn't.  I got my last bear out of the big North woods and swamps and it was mediocre at best.  I fed most of it to the dogs.  I've had a couple of bears that were good and they both came out of the corn fields.  Hunting bear in corn is a good way to loose a tough dog.  Most of them just have to be run across a lane in the corn where they can be shot.  You feel a good old rush having a bear fly past your legs one or two rows from where your standing.  If the bear doesn't wack you one, it would sure take your dang knees out on the way through.  I was walking a field for tracks last year with a friend and a hound he had in with him opened up pretty close so I squatted down and looked down the corn row, hopingto see it cross.  Here comes the dang bear running right down my row and it pulled up short of me by about 8 paces, made a couple of woofs and took a hard right.  I didn't even have a gun with me.  Out of instinct, I put my hand on my knife but in all reality, he would have wacked me one and been on his way before I could have done anything.  It all happened pretty fast. 

When I go out looking for tracks in the corn for friends (I don't run my dogs on bear) I walk the wheel lines made by the irrigation pivots.  Some fields only have a bear or two and some have 10+ bears in them.  You can walk up awfully close to a bear depending on the weather.  It's best to at least have a gun with you.  It's pretty fun but you know very well your messing with danger.  If you don't, it won't take long to figure it out.

If you want to do something like that Wisconsin is a great place for it.  This is one of the greatest bear hunting areas on the planet.  People come from all over the country for our training season (July 1st- August 31st).  Kill season starts about a week into Sept. and goes through the first week of Oct.  You can get on with most folks during training season but it's a different story when kill season arrives.  People get pretty serious when you can start killing them and it's a little harder to find someone to go with unless they know you well.  If you have someone to go with during kill season your back better be in good shape because you'll be expected to help drag bears out of the woods and handle dogs back to the trucks.  Both will take some serious work but once in a while they get caught near a road or a trail and someone can get an ATV in to do the work.  Still, getting a 400+ bear up onto an ATV or truck is a lot of work all by itself.

By the way, they're not all that big but if your hunting corn there's plenty of them that are.  Some go over 500 lbs. and once in awhile over 600 lbs.

Edited by Dan McDonough
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Definitely not like beef.  It's got a little more flavor to it.  If you get them out of the corn they are better but what isn't.  I got my last bear out of the big North woods and swamps and it was me

Rachel an American Leopard Hound and the best dog I've ever owned or been hunting with:

Well, if that's how you feel try this one on for size.  Some years ago two men we call Chief and Billy were out guiding another man on a bobcat hunt.  There were three dogs with that day.  They were P

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2 hours ago, darbo said:

A lot of this type of dog feist/mountain curs look to have docked tails but some appear to have bob tails a natural trait that some have Dan Mc ?

Yes, some are natural and 99%ofthe rest are docked.  I've had four that were natural at various lengths.  Some have about three inches, some 3/4 tailed and some are what we call frog tailed.  Frog tailed is when there's a mushy lump where the tail ought to come out.

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9 hours ago, Born Hunter said:

Dan, that bear hunting in corn sounds bloody brilliant! Keep posting fella, I enjoy reading how you guys get on.

Well, if that's how you feel try this one on for size.  Some years ago two men we call Chief and Billy were out guiding another man on a bobcat hunt.  There were three dogs with that day.  They were Pounder (Treeing Walker), Magggie (TW) and Pepper (Mtn. Cur).  Pounder is the start dog, meaning that he is put on an old track and expected to work it up and get the cat jumped.  Maggie was nearly as good on track and Pepper was better than both on a jumped race but not quite as good on working cold tracks.  Pounder and Maggie are also bear dogs, while Pepper is a bobcat and coon dog. 

Anyhow, Pounder is working this old cat track and doing a good job when he comes across a fresh bear track.  Sometimes bear come out in the middle of the winter to find a drink or lick some snow if open water can't be found.  So Pounder quits this cat track (not a good thing at the time) and gets on this bear track and takes it to the den with Maggie and Pepper following.  They track it back to it's den and jump in for a good fight. 

Meanwhile, Billy is on the road keeping track of the hunt from the truck and Chief is on the gound going to the dogs with his paid hunter in tow.  Chief, after a good long search, finds the dogs and hears that they are under ground.  After a quick glance at the setup, he realizes (and hears) that the dogs are not down there with a cat.  He decides the dogs have got to come out or there won't be any dogs left to hunt cat for this guy that is now standing about 30 feet back with a worried look on his face.

Chief decides to do the only thing you'd expect Chief to do in this situation.  He gets down on his hands and knees and pushes his front end into the bear den and starts reaching around in there trying to feel for a dog leg.  After a very short time. Chief get ahold of Pepper's leg and pulls her out.  He throws Pepper back, once he's got her all of the way out, far enough so that she knows he means business and does not want her to get back in the hole.  He then goes back in for another dog and finds Maggie's leg and proceeds to do the same as with Pepper.  Meanwhile, the paid hunter is grabbing these dogs and chaining them to trees but won't get close enough to make it any easier on Chief.

Chief makes his final push in and gets ahold of Pounder's leg and pulls, but can't seen to get the dog moving.  He leans over to let a little light into the den and notices that he can't pull Pounder out because Pounder's head is in the bear mouth and he's not letting go.  Chief then yells to his paid hunter to throw him something.  Neither of them have a gun so the hunter throws Chief on of his arrows.  Chief picks up the arrow and stuffs himself back into the den for fourth time and sticks the arrow up the bear's nose and starts drilling it around.  To Chief's surprise, the bear does not let go of Pounder. 

It may have been that the bear thought, in the darkness, that all of the pain he was feeling was coming from the dog he had in his mouth and if he let go it wouldn't end...I don't know.

Back to Chief.  Chief realizes that the bear isn't going to stop killing Pounder because of an arrow in his nose...so he takes it out and sticks it in his eye!  He drills the arrow through the bear's eye and, not realizing that the blade on the arrow will not get past the optic nerve hole to make it into the brain.  So the bear didn't die and again, it didn't let go of Pounder. 

Moments after Chief stuck that bear in the eye, Pounder goes limp.  It's at this point that the bear decides to let go of Pounder.  Just then Chief realizes he's not in a very good place for what comes next.  The bear decides it's time to vacate the den and instead of attacking Chief, the bear bowls Chief over as he is trying to back out of the entrance to the den.  The bear didn't put a single scratch on Chief, only knocking him over on his way out of this situation.  Chief said the bear weighed about 500 pounds if he weighed one.

So the bear is out and two of the dogs are unhurt, aside from a few scratches.  Chief is unhurt and the bear is gone.  By this time Billy has made it into the den area (with only a .22 cal. rifle) and is asking where Pounder is.  Chief points to the hole and all you can see is Pounder's leg sticking out and he's dead.  As they were talking about the event, Pounder stands up and comes out of the hole with blood pumping out of cracks in his head and one eye that had popped out due to the pressure of the bears bite on his head.  Billy calls to Pounder and Pounder comes but it doesn't look good for Pounder so they put him down right there and buried him in that den.

I was not there that day but I've heard this story form Chief many times and he's no liar, or one to exaggerate.  Pounder was an exceptional dog that Billy had raised and later sold to Chief for a goodly sum of money.  If any of you knew Chief, you wouldn't be very surprised to hear about this.  John Wick, one of the most famous houndsman in the history of the USA wrote a story about this in an article in Coonhound Bloodlines magazine.  John Wick has known Chief for many years and said of Chief that he's never met another person with so little caution for their own safety and he can hardly believe that Chief is still alive.  John wrote that article around 10 years ago and Chief is still kicking at age 75.  He coon hunts fairly regularly and is planning on going lion hunting this Winter. 

Never give up!

If you would like to see a picture of Chief, there is one of him along with my son and I on my FB page, in my photos.

How about them apples Born Hunter? :)

Edited by Dan McDonough
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19 hours ago, Born Hunter said:

:icon_eek: Great account Dan. I can believe it. :victory:

Chief is still kicking, I can give you his phone number if you want. ;)  That's not his real name if you haven't already guessed.  He's a little bit on the impatient side most of the time but if you catch him at the right time he's got more stories than it wood take to fill a fairly large book.

Chief has run a hunt club for over 40 years.  He took up coon hunting way back when as a way to get out and have some fun after a day of managing pheasant shoots, duck shoots and sporting clays.

He raised a family there at the club and has guided bear, mountain lion and bobcat hunts to fill in the lull of winter in that business.

Chief is the best hound finisher I've met and though he's not the greatest pup starter I can think of, he is a true master of the hounds.  He's also the best rig dog trainer I've met.

For those of you who are not familiar with rigging a dog.  It's when you train a hound to ride in or on a box on your truck and the hound bawls/barks when it smells the intended game.  It takes a fiar amount ofwork to get the hound to do this only when it smells coon or bobcats or bear or whatever it is that your are looking for.

When you have a properly trained rig dog, you can drive through the country side during the kill season and keep from wasting time looking for animals by having to put the dog on the ground in a likely area a wait for the hound to hunt a critter up.  When the critter is found by rigging it, the hound has only to go and tree it or catch it on the ground.

Done right, I've seen high caliber rig dogs put up 10 coon in half a night, which is very good in this country.  I can train a rig dog but not quite to the standard that Chief's dogs operate at.  Some of that is because the line of dogs that I hunt aren't as natural on the rig as the line the hunts.  The hounds I hunt have other talents that make them worth keeping, particularly for bobcats so I'm not switching lines any time soon.  But, for rigging coon, he beats me quite regularly.

The best rig dog I've seen was a Treeing Walker Chief owned named Spook.  He had good speed, would rig coon only in all weather, had good speed on the track but was by no means the fastest track dog I've seen.  Spook had a great bawl mouth on the rig and on the track with a nice chop mouth on the tree and a nice bawl locate.  He was very accurate and was one of the most accurate Treeing Walkers I've been to the woods with.

Anyhow, Chief has a lot of talents and good stories.  He's one of those people that should have a book written about him.  It would be a very good read because he rarely does anything a little.

 

Edited by Dan McDonough
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On 11/6/2017 at 14:55, Dan McDonough said:

Those feist dogs have been bred for a couple of hundred years for their treeing ability.  If I were real serious about it I would be after a mtn. cur because it's easier to find a great one, though if you know where to go, it's the same way with feists.  I'm just not as impressed with the feists.  There are a couple exceptions.  The Mullins feists and the McAndrews feists are top notch.  I hunted with a dog called Dummy, a McAmdrews feist, that was nearly as good as my Jagdterrier that I was competition hunting with at the time.  Both of those dogs were out classed for competition hunting by a Stephens Cur name Skeeter that year.  I don't think a Stephens Cur is likely to be you folks type of dog though.  Most of them are open on track, like the Leopard Hounds.

The nice thing about the Jagdterriers for hunting whatever game you choose is that while they are open on track, most of them sound like a distressed Poodle and aren't likely to attract much attention the way a hound does.  I used to take my dog Raven (Jagd) into the suburban neighborhoods and coon hunt all night long.  I used subsonic .22's so as not to wake people when the game was shot near a house.  As long as I didn't leave Raven treeing for an extended period of time, no one ever seemed to care or even turn their light on.  I would imagine some folks did hear her but she sounded like a lapdog and did not sound like a big dog, though I could hear that screechy voice of hers from a long ways away.  She piled up a lot of fur for me and never caused any trouble.  The only complaints I ever had about that dog was that she was hard to potty train and she was to small to handle coon by herself.  Other than that, she was one of the most productive dogs I've owned.

Are those Plummer Terriers open on track?

Mine were, sang like hounds on a line. If you have one that sings, the rest usually pick up the habit. You would have some fun over there with them Dan.

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2 hours ago, stormyboy said:

Mine were, sang like hounds on a line. If you have one that sings, the rest usually pick up the habit. You would have some fun over there with them Dan.

All of my lurchers and stags sign a couple of times a day and a couple of times night.  I like it but the wife could do without the night time serenades. 

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