July 30, 2025 • 45 mins
In this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, Clay Newcomb interviews California native, Ed Vance. Ed shares his incredible story of determination and perseverance from growing up as a suburban kid just dreaming of hunting to moving to the Sierra Nevada’s in rural California, finding and training dogs, building relationships with hunting mentors, and developing a guide service as a successful dry ground mountain lion and bear hunting guide.
Check out Ed's book at www.trainedbyahounddog.com
A version of this interview played on Bear Hunting Magazine Podcast in 2019.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Next thing I knew I was I was so so
dog going for I was hurting for money so bad
that i'd coast home. I'd find when I'd be driving home,
I turned the motor off so I didn't burn the
gas trop going down hill. That and next thing I
knew that I could leave the motor running used to
get home.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And you were catching so many lines you could leave
the motor running when I was riding down the road
going down the hill.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
YE made it.
Speaker 4 (00:28):
Yeah, Yeah, I was really getting riched.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
This is the story of Houndsman Advance in his twenty
five years guiding and hunting lions and bears in California.
He started as a suburban kid in the nineteen forties
with no connection to hounds or hunting, but would go on,
as he says, to be trained by a hound dog.
Ed published a book by that title in twenty nineteen,
(00:55):
and some time ago I traveled out to California to
hear his story of struggle, per severance, and success firsthand.
This story examines the drive of a young man to succeed.
I really doubt that you're going to want to miss
this one. My name is Clay Knukem, and this is
(01:22):
the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant,
search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell
the story of Americans who live their lives close to
the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American made purpose built
hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged
(01:45):
as the place as we explore. I'm in Posey, California,
two and a half hours from Los Angeles, in the
southern one third of the state, at the southern tip
of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It was a time when
(02:07):
California was the place to be if you wanted to
hunt big game with hounds.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
This place is gorgeous. This isn't what I expected.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
From this property.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
I caught lions and bears all over everything.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
All of the stuff that you can see.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Advance points to a black hide draped over a couch.
It's the only hide in this house. He's not going
to tell me a story. He's going to show it
to me.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
That was one of the toughest bears that I'd ever
got my dogs after. I mean, I'd had others that
were just as bad. But because there's the right here,
I'm going to explain to you, and I'm going to
show you where it started, where it went to, and
where it ended from.
Speaker 4 (02:57):
Right here at this house.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Ed's home sits on top of a scrub oak covered
hill with a stunning three hundred and sixty degree view.
I envisioned this is what the mountainous regions of Kenya
look like. There are yellow, parched grasslands on big rolling mountains,
Emerald green oaks with round canopies stand alone dotting the
landscape like the dark rosettes of a jaguar.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
The hills flow with the smooth.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Lines like that of a cat's shoulders hips and the
swooping tail like the deep valleys. Fully wooded and steep
rimrock bluffs break up the terrain in places. It's the
kind of place you feel like you need a horse.
This is some unusual and beautiful country. Ed points across
a deep valley, and to the east is a long
(03:48):
ridge that dominates the landscape.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
This particular bear that I got out after it was
in it started him in October and it was just
at the crack of dawn, and so we stopped and
I said, I'm going to walk up a canyon and
see if I can get a bear started up there,
and I'm going to show you where this is at.
You see this bridge right in front of him, So
(04:13):
you see a lone tree standing up there all by myself. Yeah,
from that tree, if you went straight down into the canyon,
straight down into the bottom, that's where they started this bear.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
By my best guess, they jumped the bear three miles
from Ed's back porch. This hunt took place in the
early nineteen seventies, but the landscape doesn't look much different
now than then there because that's been burned.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
They pulled him out of that cannon. He came out
of that canyon, crossed onto this side of that ridge,
and he skirted that ridge almost on the top all
the way around, and then where you can see that
one high point, he turned and he went to the
opposite side of it. Now there was no roads to
speak of, and so I was following him on foot.
(05:02):
By the time I got to there, I could hear
those dogs. It was placed called Portuguese Pass, and Portuguese
Pass is the furthest ridge that you can see.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Yeah, I see over there as.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Far as you can see, and he's just about to
go over.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
And I thought, if he goes over.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
That so there's a big valley in between that.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
It's called bull Run Basin. The other side is called
bull Run Basin.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Anyways, Portuguese Pass is seven thousand feet in elevation. It
looks to be six or seven miles from where we're standing.
But the bear keeps running and Ed was following the
dogs by sound. This was thirty years before GPS, when
you turn dogs loose with just a leather collar on
their neck.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
And they were Then he was moving and and these
dogs were were hitting it as hard as they could,
and that is like extremely steep and rough. Yeah, and
then I lost hearing of them. Now we're gonna have
to walk to another spot over then I'm gonna shows
you where this thing ended up at.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
We walked forty yards to the north side of Ed's house,
and the panoramic story continues so far. We can see
every rock step he and the dogs covered.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
So I came down through all of that, and it's
late in the afternoon. Now, I keep in mind this
started at about six in the morning, late in the afternoon,
which would be about I'm gonna say about three o'clock.
I crossed this road right here, the road that I'm
living on. But I was about four miles up and
I took my CBE radio and I to see if
(06:42):
anybody was there. And so this friend of mine, it
had been honey with me, he wasn't. I didn't even
know he was going to be up for this David.
When I triggered my mic on my CV radio, Lewis
answered and he asked where I was at, and I
told him. By then, the dogs had traveled at least
ten twelve miles through this steep terrain that you're looking at.
(07:05):
And I says, have you heard my dogs? And he says, yes,
your dogs. The last I heard him, He says, your
dogs are down on White River by the campground. Now,
I'm going to show you a White River campground.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
Is that We got a walk.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Now we walk to the west side of the house,
and far in the distance is a long ridge. It's
hard to imagine traveling this far on foot in a
single day.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
He wanted to come and pick me up, and I says, no,
I want to just go across the country. I'm just
gonna keep it's all downhill, and I can travel pretty
fast going downhill, And as long as I know that
that's where they're at and I says, so I'm going
to go drop down to on what's called bear Trot Ridge.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
This is bear Trot Fridge right to our.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Right from Lewis this time, you've already traveled twelve fourteen
miles close to that, through through air miles, and so
we're going down in these steep valleys and ravines and
up mountains.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yes, because where the bear was started was at the
five thousand foot elevation and Portuguese passes seven thousand.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
Wow, So they almost got He almost had to.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
You had to go.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
You had to lose elevation and gain it.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
And many times yes, yes, back and forth, back and forth.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
This trek would have to push the limits of an
elite athlete for a day's travel. But there's an ancient
adrenaline download. When a man is following his hounds, emphasis
on his hounds, it can produce a superhuman drive. Ed
describes how he crossed a big valley heading towards the
White River and he could now hear the dogs barking
(08:47):
every breath, but this bear just won't tree. He knew
this bear, and he knew that it wouldn't trill.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
He was getting close to cross and over and I
got to where I could drop down, and I came
head on onto him and we walked right into each other.
When he saw me, he spun and I had.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
This far with the dogs behind him.
Speaker 4 (09:09):
They weren't behind him, they were all right alongside of him.
They were right on him. Yeah, they're just walking, yes,
but they knew.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
You don't a dog didn't dare taking and put his
mouth on that bear.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
They knew with his three or four dogs swarming, the
bear edge shoots as it spins, but misses the mark.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
And he took off.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
And if you'll see that farthest ridge that we can
see over there in the in the distance, I got
my next shot at him, and I was almost at
the bottom between those two ridges. In fact, there's some
ranchers said they was listening to the whole thing. Oh wow,
And I shot and killed him right there.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
So how many miles it is, I don't know, but
I do know this. I had twenty minutes to get
the height off of him, and there's going to be dark.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
That's an incredible feed for the has been an incredible
feat for a man.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
Man.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
How far do you think you went?
Speaker 3 (10:05):
I mean really in miles?
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Actually, Yeah, there was a dirt trail and I was
walking it twenty five twenty five miles, I think.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Gaining I've never heard while I saw such a panoramic
story where you could see such distance from the same hilltop,
and I'd say, this is a good introduction to advance.
I'd like to tell you how I met him. I'd
say it was quite unusual for me.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Several months ago.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
It was probably Lynnette that contacted me and said, I'd
like to send you a book that my husband wrote.
And I said, well, sure, And I get a lot
of books.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Ed, I really do a lot of people. A lot
of people write books, and I read a lot of books.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
And when I read this book, I could tell that
the voice of this writer was someone special. I really did,
and I as I read the book, I thought, man,
I'd like to meet that guy.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
And so anyway, thank you for host you welcome.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
We're sure you're happy to have you here.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
But it's an incredible and beautiful place.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
We're on the southern southern tip of the Sierra Nevadas
in a mountain range known as the Greenhorn Mountains, and
Sequoyan National Forest and Sequoi National Monument is right on
these Greenhorn Mountains. It's the place that a lot of
people really don't know about.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Well, this morning we started often. I mean we were
in Los Angeles, Yes, Los Angeles, California. Seven lane going
one way, seven lane traffic going the other, and we
drove two and a half hours, and I mean we're
twenty miles from a gas station.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
I mean we're here more than that.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
More than that, we're in your wilderness.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
Really, you're forty miles away from the gas station.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
For all the negative press California he gets, this place
is a natural wonder with an order of geologic and
biologic diversity greater than any state. It's no wonder people
flocked here. I wanted to ask ed how he got
into hound hunting.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
You know, I always as a kid.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
I grew up in a suburb for the town by
the name of Glendale in California. And in those days,
of course, the population wasn't what it was today, and
I kind of liked the act, like I was hunting
him because of it. Right from our house, you just
go off in the hills they're just covered with brush,
just to kind of make believe, you know. But over
(12:38):
time I drifted away from that and then I found
myself working at an assembly plant for Chevrolet in Van Eys, California,
and directly across the line from me was a guy
by the name Sherwood Barrett. He was from Georgia, and
in Sherwood he was a Mormon, and he told me,
he says that he left Georgia and he's on his
(13:00):
way to Salt Lake City, and uh, because he wanted
to live there, but he had to get go someplace
and earn some money in the process, and so he
was I was putting gas lines, gasoline lines on these
cars as they passed through fifty something an hour, so
we'd get a few moments every now and then to visit.
And he started telling me about chasing these hound dogs
(13:21):
in the Oki Finok Swamp in Georgia, and uh, it
really caught my interests. I mean it really did.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
And the next were down there, they're hunting hunting coons,
hunting coons, yeah, yep.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
And uh so anyways, he tell me these stories about
this but what he was doing, and it just really
caught my interest, and so I asked him, I said, sure,
where would you where do you go to buy these dogs?
And he told me says, go to like outdoor life.
They had these guys advertising. I didn't know at the
time that most of those guys were selling dogs that
(13:55):
nobody wanted, you know, and people like myself would buy
them because I didn't know what I was buying in
the first place. So anyways, I started with that.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
And what was your intention?
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Was your intention to run lion or bear?
Speaker 1 (14:09):
I just wanted I like dogs, and I liked the
idea of hunting and a honeywood dogs sounding it could.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
So you would have been in your early twenties probably
at this.
Speaker 4 (14:17):
Time I was. I was.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
I just wanted some hunting dogs.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
I was like twenty years old, yeah, and nobody in
my family had ever even heard of it. And so
I wed Heed a dog from him, and I got
a red bone hound and his nice looking dog actually
called him Buck.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Buck was shipped in a wooden crate by rail from
a kindle in Arkansas, and he paid thirty five dollars
for the dog and another thirty five for the shipping.
This first dog purchase coincided with a complete lifestyle change.
Is Ed moved to the city of Ohigh in rural California,
where he bought some horses and got a job working
(14:57):
at a self service gas station or sixty to seventy
hours a week to cover his expenses. But he was
about to meet somebody that would change his life.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
So I got this dog and didn't know where to
go hunting. So I took off and I went up
in the mountains up by Ventura, which is just covered
with brushia I actually have a terrible place to try
and hunt dogs, and I never caught anything with him.
And then I started meeting different guys that had hound dogs,
and they weren't doing any good either, and so I
(15:31):
fooled around with those, and eventually I learned that what
these dogs were chasing was not anything they could climb
a tree at all. That the guys I was hunting
with they were chasing deers. What they were chasing, you know.
So the time went by, and next thing I knew,
I was introduced to a guy out of Utah by
the name of Willis Butteov, which was a very well
(15:53):
known government hunter and had caught hundreds of lions, unbelievable
numbers of life. So I got with him and hunted
with him a few times and bought a few dogs
from him. From there I started learning about the difference
between hunting dogs and taking dogs hunting and catching stuff,
(16:14):
and so then from there I ended up losing a
couple of these dogs to ten eighty poison, which was
terrible situation that was in Utah.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Ed wanted a dog that would treat mountain lions, and
after a couple of years of messing around with dogs
running deer, in nineteen sixty two, he drove seven hundred
miles one way in his nineteen fifty one gmc three
quarter ton pickup to meet a man named Willis Butov
in Utah. Can you imagine driving a truck like that
(16:47):
that far? Ed was in his twenties and had never
treated a single animal with his hound. In the book,
he describes arriving at Buttev's house visiting for several hours
before he he asked the man, when was the last
time you treat a lion? Ed wrote quote. He paused
(17:07):
for a minute and appeared as though he was trying
to remember back in time, and then he said today.
Buttev had killed the lion that very day and couldn't
remember it, and he had the hide saltan on the
back porch. Turns out Buttov had over four hundred and
fifty documented lion kills in Utah as a government hunter
(17:29):
during the bounty years. He was the real deal and
Ed was finally in the right place. Their relationship would
last many years, and Ed bought several young dogs from
him that never really worked out. A couple of years
after their initial meeting, Ed made the trip again to
Utah to hunt with Buttov, and while in the mountains,
(17:52):
they got word that Buttev's father had passed away in
sun Danced, Wyoming, And to kind of show you what
kind of man Ed was, Ed volunteered to drive Buttov
seven hundred miles one way to the funeral in his
new four wheel drive International Scout in the dead of winter.
Ed remembers they had to cover themselves with blankets while
(18:14):
they drove so they didn't freeze. The entire trip, they
talked about dogs. Ed was eating up every second he
had with Buttov, and what Buttov didn't know is that
Ed had taken out a thousand dollars loan with the
hopes to buy one of Buttov's lead dogs, not a
young one, but a fully trained lion hound, And on
(18:37):
the fourteen hundred mile trip, he agreed to sell Ed
one of his top hounds. Ed finally had a legit
lion hound. But listen to this, tragically and literally, the
first time that Ed turned the dog loose after paying
one thousand dollars for it, it was killed by TIS
(19:00):
eighty poison sodium flora acetate. This stuff was used to
kill ground squirrels and predators in California, and dogs that
would even find the dead carcass killed by the poison,
they themselves would get poisoned.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
And was devastated.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
So he again was back in the business of looking
for yet another dog. It was now nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
And then I ended up meeting a guy that he
worked for a big farm out of Wasco, California, and
he said that people told me that he had a
hound that he might sell because of his age. I
got in touch with him. Guy's names J. D. Reynolds,
and he had this red tick hound that he said
he would sell, and I bought him, and I couldn't
(19:51):
believe what I had bought. I went from this from
not catching anything to speak of. So every time I
put that dog's foot on the ground, he caught something
and he didn't run deer. He didn't run coyotes, and
he caught bobcats and raccoons and foxes every time he
(20:11):
hit the ground practically. And from there I started learning
the difference between good dogs, mediocre dogs, and dogs that
just aren't any good. So on the book that I
titled Trained by a Hound Dog, the title was really
thinking about this dog, this red takeown.
Speaker 4 (20:28):
Which we called Bo.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Like I say, he was six years old when I
got him. I was working as a carpenter framing houses
in Thousand Oaks, California, where framing houses there as a
carpenter was more like an athletic contest than it was
anything else, because it's all piece work and you didn't
get paid much. If you're going to have any money
at all, you're gonna work like you're fighting fire from
(20:51):
the moment she got there until there's time to go home,
which I did, and I take and load bow up
on Friday nights and I head off from the Ventura,
California to the Greenhorn Mountains, which is where we're at
right now, and which is where Bo was. Ray who
actually trained. He came from Arkansas. He was a red
(21:12):
de count out of the Elbert Vaughan stock of English hounds,
which eventually to be canting the Elber Blue tich.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
If you're into hounds, you probably recognize the name Elbert Vaughan,
who made quite the mark on the Bluetick breed. But
the most compelling part of this story is the examination
of a young man's drive to succeed, starting from absolute
zero in the suburbs. It took him four years, a
lifestyle change, thousands of miles of travel. He went through
(21:44):
about ten dogs, countless dead ends, some of them tragic
and out of his control. But finally he got started
with this hound named bow Whatever you do in life,
it's going to take some work and there will be pain.
He had any of excuses to quit.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
I think that first year I'd get off work and
I'd drive all the way up here, which was three
and a half to four hours each way, after working
all all week. And I think that first year I
had Bowen and I bought a plot hound. I called
him Pat, and he was like two years old when
I got him. Bo wouldn't run a line at all.
(22:23):
He wouldn't I'd find a line track is fresh, and
he wouldn't pay any attention. But Pat had been on
some lions. I got Pat from Willis Putev in Utah,
and he'd been on these lions, so he he was
eager more eager to try and trail. And then Boa
was Bo didn't care. I think I caught on Friday
(22:44):
night hunting Friday nights and Saturday right out one hundred
animals that first year. And that was driving four hours
each way to go after putting in five days of
slave labor type work. You know, which of is basically
bobcats and foxes with So.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
They'd treat these foxes and these little oak trees.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
They do tree here there.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
It's called a grave cross fox. They're a lot harder
to tree than the bobcats are.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Starting from zero, Ed was now on his way, and
what would happen with Bo is that after Pat the
plot started trailing lions, Bo joined him and the pair
became an extraordinary team catching lions. But when you get
into hounds, it starts a never ending cycle of always
needing more dogs. So he hit the road again, driving
(23:31):
to Arkansas to meet with the blue tick breeder Albert Vaughan,
where he picked up some hounds that would become instrumental
in his pack for years to come. Ed and his
pack started treating lions and bears consistently, which led Ed
to want to change professions and become a full time
lion and bear outfitter.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
I started advertising. I'd hurt my back really bad in
framing houses, and I I just couldn't. I couldn't and
keep doing it. So I left Ventura and I moved
to this area where we're out here. That was in
nineteen sixty six. When I moved here, I've been keeping mind,
had been hunting it for about three or four.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Years, been.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Traveling back and forth. But I moved here full time.
Started running some ads in the magazine, like Outdoor Life magazine,
fifty dollars a month for a one tolam inch ad.
And it was it was just about broke me to
have to pay that advertisement, you know, And I was
I was so poor. I was poor as a church mouse,
(24:34):
as a sands go you know, living in the back
of my truck at the same time. But anyways, I
rented an old shack, moved into that, started advertising and
I started getting some customers.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Ed bought a typewriter at a pawn shop and started
printing out brochures for his lion hunts that he hung
all across town. For a successful lion hunt, he charged
five hundred dollars, and if they treat a bobcat, it
was an extra fifty. It was now in nineteen sixty six,
and only three years prior, the bounty on Mountain lions
was stopped and lions were being managed as game animals.
(25:12):
Ed got his California guide license, which was nothing more
than a formality, and he was on his way. But
in the late fall of nineteen sixty seven, something beyond
his control happened.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
And it started to grow from there, you know, and
then I ended up having a I guess people started
knowing a little bit about me being there. And I
knew this guy lived up at Sugarloa Village, and he
said that he knew a guy that worked for the
La Times, and he talked to him about what I
was doing, and they wanted to know if they could
(25:46):
come up here and I'd take him lying under they'd
run an article in the Los Angeles Times, so you know,
I said, well, yeah, okay, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
And this was obviously a time when was a little
more favorable to hunt lions California.
Speaker 4 (26:00):
Yes, it was so.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Anyways, these guys came up, the guy named Dewey Lindsay,
and with him was this photographer that worked for the
He's a freelance photographer basically worked for a national geographic
And here I am twenty five years old with about
three hound dogs, and I got these high powered professionals
from Los Amps that come up here and want me
(26:24):
to catch a lion. They said, I only got three
days to do it. In the pressure was really on
because trying to you know, there's one thing to catch
a lion. Well, you're just out there hunting and you
run into them and you catch him as a as
they become available. But if you're going to do this
as a profession and you got people coming in and
you're on a no catch, no pay.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
Which I was at those days, no catch, no pay,
no catch, no pay. If you didn't catch it, you
didn't get paid anything.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Was that common back then or is that just something
that you wanted to.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
No, No, that was common. That was the way it
was everywhere, all of them through the mount in states.
Everybody no catch, no pay. You had to show for
these people around and pay for their food and sometimes
drive a couple hundred miles each way to an airport
to pick them up and take them back. And if
you didn't catch them a lion, you didn't get paid anything.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
So that's business.
Speaker 4 (27:17):
The pressure was on, you know.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
Made for some good outfitters, didn't it.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
It separated them, It truly did. Yeah, I caught them
a lion on the on the third day.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Third day, and you're just dry ground line hunting, so
you're just roaming around free casting the dogs. No, were
you on your horse at that.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
No, I didn't know. I wasn't using horse. What what
I'd have to do is I just had to go
places where I knew that lions would frequent and and
you know, they're they're kind of a strange animal in
that you find lions that would use certain areas and
airs are close by. They wouldn't even go and bother
over there. So I would go to these places where
(27:59):
I knew that it either caught lions already or I'd
seen lions. I was really looking for someplace where I
could find a lion track, knowing that I hadn't already
caught the thing.
Speaker 4 (28:12):
So anyways, we ended.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Up catching the lion and they they ran this story
in the What's we call West magazine to the Los
Angeles Time. It's a weekend color magazine, and through that ad,
it generated quite a bit of a business for me.
Next thing I knew I was I was so so
dog gone for I was hurting for money so bad
(28:34):
that i'd coast home. I'd find when I'd be driving home,
I turned the motor off so I didn't burn the
gas for it going downhill. But and next thing I
knew that I could leave the motor running needs to
get home.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
And you were catching some eighty lines. You could leave
the motors running when I start riding down the road.
That's right going down the hill.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Ye made it?
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Yeah, Yeah, I was really getting rich during the years
that I did all this. I wouldn't trade the memories
of that for anything at all. I mean, it was
just something that was just really important to me, and
(29:13):
I cherished those memories a dozen years there. I made
my living from that. If I had two nickels to
rub together, it was because somebody gave me that for
taking a hunting, And if they gave it to me
for taking a hunting, it's because they got the animal
that they were hunting for. Or they didn't give me
the two nickels, you know. But I'll tell you what.
Speaker 4 (29:34):
I was so poor. It took every penny.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
That I made to feed those dogs, buy new ones
if I needed to buy a dog, pay for gas.
Trucks didn't last very long in those days. Seventy thousand
miles on a truck that I was driving new, buy
one brand new, and then seventy thousand.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
Miles later it was pretty rough shape.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
So anyways, from there, I stayed in California, Yah, doing
the line of the bear, and I took the I
started hunting bears in northern California. I'd run into a
guy and his two boys, and it was nineteen sixty six,
it was December twenty seventh, I think, and we caught
(30:16):
this lion, but we got a flat tire and we
were just about ready to leave, and we're right at
the end of the dead end road. Anyways, at the
end of the road, couldn't be five hundred feet away
from us. I look down the road and there's these
two boys standing there with four hound dogs and asked
Roy Stevenson. I said, do you know those kids? He says,
(30:36):
I've never seen him in my life. And there was
a friendship that is still going on today. The two
boys was Bobby Bridges and Gary Bridges and their father,
Jim Bridges, who's now passed on, and we hit it
off really well. So next thing I knew, I was
up there taking bear hunts and Shatta County and Jim
Bridges was giving me a hand at it, and I
(30:58):
ended up buying three of those dogs that were standing
at the end of the road that day. Jim was
one of the actually one of the finest men that
I think I've ever known in my life. You could
believe anything he said, and you can't find any of
them that you can do that with.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
You never know when you're going to meet a friend
that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Ed met the Bridges at the end of a dead
end road. I really like Ed's qualification of a good man.
He said you could believe anything he said, which puzzled
me for a minute at how rare Ed implied this
trait to be. But I think a lot of people
(31:37):
just tell you what you want to hear. They may
not lie to you, but they don't tell you the
whole truth. And some people just aren't competent, and what
they say is often flawed, not reflecting reality. It's not
that they blatantly lie, it's just you can't really trust
their judgment. It made me stop and ask what integrity
(31:59):
really is. It's a powerful exercise to do a deep
analysis of your personal integrity, and only you, with the
help of God, can do that.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
I wanted to ask ed about horses.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
I know in your book you talk about and this
is one thing that intrigued me. Was you hunted on
horseback a lot? Was that one of your favorite ways
to hunt ed was hunting on horseback with the dog's
free ranging out.
Speaker 4 (32:33):
I did enjoy that.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
It was you know, the easiest way to hunt dogs
is to turn the dogs loose and let him run
down the road in front of a pick out and
follo him in a truck. But in lion hunting, sometimes
with what I was doing, see, I couldn't catch lines
at just my leisure. It didn't make any difference. If
I was out there and caught a line, I didn't
have anyone with me. I didn't do any good. I
(32:57):
didn't get paid anything, and I was full time doing this,
so I needed a paying customer to be with me
and a paying customer had to be there.
Speaker 4 (33:06):
When I caught it. Yeah, I mean I could catch it.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
I could catch the line the day after the guy left,
and it didn't do me any good because he left
and he took his money with him when he was
when he left. You know, So during those years I
had to go wherever the lions were at. It's like
most of the hunts were like one week hunts, and
during that week period of time, I had to come
up with the lion. And if I didn't come up
(33:29):
with the lion, I just got to I just got
to pay the bill all by myself.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
You know, did that happen very often? Or did you
catch most most people lines?
Speaker 1 (33:36):
You know, I was running of both the line, the
both line and barns. I was hitting pretty close to
ninety percent, which meant you if you had if you
had a guy on a lion hunt, you didn't get
much time to do that. So you better know where
there's one at. And so to do that, I had
to stay active, actively looking, even if I had nobody
(33:59):
with me. Well here comes the horse now, Okay. I
drive roads. I look for tracks alongside the roads, walks
and trails. But you can only walk so far. Then
there's other areas that you know that are pretty decent
for having lions in them. But it didn't do you
any good to go way back in the back country.
If you're going to take what we used to call
them dudes, take them in there to go catch a line,
(34:21):
because you had to get them in there too, you know.
So I would take and I'd use the horse to
scout to constantly look see if I could find a line.
If I caught them, i'd make sure i'd let them go,
but try and keep tract of it so that you
could hopefully find it again, which wasn't all that often.
I seemed like I'd guess lines, let them go, and
I never seem to see their tracks again. But anyways,
(34:45):
how many did I catch as compared to driving roads?
I caught more driving roads just because you can travel.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
Fast, just it's an efficient way to hunt.
Speaker 4 (34:54):
It is you can travel much faster.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
You're looking for an actual track, yes, dirt track in
the road.
Speaker 4 (34:59):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Lions, At least where I was hunting them, they seemed
to use trails. They were obvious to you. You get
to the point to where you could you could you
find a lion track. You're walking up a canyon, you
find a lion track, and just going a certain direction,
you look off in the distance.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
You could just about say, if this lion.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Has gone that far whatever that is, a mile or
whatever it is, the chances are he went right through there, and.
Speaker 4 (35:26):
You almost look, yes, you almost always right.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
And the and the bears at that time in these
Greenhorn Mountains, which is where we're at, the bear pop
place was very poor. They'd had had a drought, a
severe drought in the late nineteen fifties. They said that
the bears went clear to the San Joaquin Valley in
those years. And in those years they were using the
(35:52):
poison called ten eighty to kill ground squirrels and everything else.
And ten eighty is a kind of a poison that
if a ground squirrel eat and something comes along and
eats the ground squirrel, it's going to kill that thing too.
And I kind of think that between the drought and
the widespread poisoning ground squirrels in these mountains, that had
(36:13):
just about wiped the bear population now for a long,
long waist away, And it wasn't until about nineteen sixty eight,
which would be about ten years after that drought that
we started spinning bears showing up. Yeah, and the bears
that we've would show up, they were adults, they were
all and most of our big, big bears to boots.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
You know.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
It weren't finding anything of females with cubs. They're just
pretty good sized bears, and I think they just moved
into here. But up until then, up until about nineteen seventy,
I was spending all my time for the bear on
south in northern California.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
What Ed is saying checks out, because males will be
the first ones to repopulate new territory. And interestingly, as
many know today, California has the most bears of any
state in the lower forty eight. The last half century
for black bears has surprised biologists by how quickly they
can come back.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
That's a good thing. And back to horse hunting.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Ed had a really cool truck with a stock crack
and the bed built in dog boxes that he hauled
his horses and dogs without a trailer.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
I've been watting one of those ever since I saw
his What was your favorite to chase with your hounds?
Speaker 4 (37:30):
I love chasing bears.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
Did you more than lions?
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Oh, that's hard to say. I'll tell you what I
liked about about the lion hunt. I really did enjoy
catching a lion where the dogs would start with a track.
There was almost nothing were they'd out there, and you
had to have dogs had good cold noses to where
they'd done. You find a lion track in the dirt
(37:54):
and you point out it, and they stick their nose
down there. They couldn't smell it, but they knew you
were pointing something out. They started looking. They'd find a
twig that had touched that animal side and they could
smell it on that twig, and they'd bark. And you
look at the ground where they're at, and there's that
lion's track, and you start from that, and maybe ten
(38:15):
miles later you're looking at the lion. That to me
made it all worthwhile. That was that was hunting dogs.
That wasn't hunting lions. That was taking dogs and seeing
them at their very finest, and I just loved that.
I know, there's lots of lines that I'd caught people
(38:35):
that I'd taken in the past. After writing this book,
they'd asked me about it, and I forgot all about
it because they were what we call a pop ups.
You know, you cut the track and it was fresh. Yeah,
a lie wasn't very far away from.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
You, So that was the easy one.
Speaker 4 (38:50):
Those Areasi's pop ups.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
You don't even forget about them, but those ones that
where you get out out to those things. Then you
go all day long just working, sometimes in the summertime
where the dog just just taking both of you. You
got to find the track to help the dog, and
the dog take the track a little ways where you
couldn't find it, and next thing you know, they turned
that thing into a movable track and like, say, miles later,
(39:14):
you're looking at it, there is a tree.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
One thing that you did, and this I noticed inside
the book was you did some incredible athletic feats. In
my mind following these dogs. Were you a really great athlete?
Speaker 4 (39:29):
Ed No.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
As a matter of fact, as an infant, I had
to berkulosis, and they figured that I would never be
able to do anything athleticalized. But then i'd also had
learned that your lungs can repair, and.
Speaker 4 (39:46):
Apparently mine did.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
Yeah, and you know I would go places that following
a hound dog. I wouldn't even think of going there.
But it was because the dogs and I were doing
this together. Let me put it like this, but the
numbers of lines that I caught, I left let a
lot of them go, just let them go. Same with bears.
I let hundreds of bears go. I mean hundreds. It
(40:10):
was all about dog honting. There's a lot of times,
you know, I keep telling myself, no paint, no gain,
you know, But if I could hear those dogs, I'm
going to them. And there was one time in my
entire career that my dogs treat a bear and I
(40:32):
didn't go to him. I started to go to him,
but I had two guys with me. This is up
in Shasta County. They treat a bear in this place
called Hellsol that's with the name of that canyon. And
that canyon is so steep that you had to hang
on to stuff as you're going downhill, otherwise you're going
to just start sliding.
Speaker 4 (40:51):
Then you go all the way to the bottom.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
And from where the where we started, the bear, they
dropped off in a canyon that is about fifteen hundred
feet in elevation into the bottom of straight down and
treated about a thousand feet up the other side. And
we started going down to these dogs that had two
guys with me. One of them was really heavy set,
and I knew that Hugh was never going to get there.
(41:15):
The dogs were just blowing the top out of this
tree and across the canyon. From where we were standing
to where those dogs were actually trim we could not
have been a thousand feet through the air apart from
each other. And so I asked these guys, I said,
what's going to happen if we get to the bottom,
(41:36):
you're going to be able to get back to the
up to the top, because if you can't, there's no
sense going down there. And they told me, they says,
we'll never make it. So I started yelling and I
fired my rifle a couple of times, and it's really
surprised me. I don't remember how many dogs I had,
and I probably I usually I usually had about four.
I liked to during the embarrassed season, I like to
(41:59):
have no less them three and usually about four.
Speaker 4 (42:02):
I'd rotate the dog.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
You could catch dogs. You can catch bears with three,
four or five hounds.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Yes, yeah, I'll tell you a little about my philosophy
on that. But anyways, the dogs came to me and
I was totally shocked that they quit and came across
that canyon. But as we got out of there, you know,
(42:30):
when it comes to numbers of dogs, Willi's butt off.
He's a lion. He was a guy of excuse, went
to god. He was a government hunter, but he also
guided people as well, and he's he trapped for coyotes.
He uses dogs for lions and bears. Stop killing lions
and bears. And he told me early on, he said,
(42:51):
if you have three or four dogs that can't catch
a bear, you don't need more, you need new ones.
Speaker 4 (42:59):
Yeah, on that to be true.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
What Ed is saying isn't wrong. But as you take
a wider look at America, every region is different, and
in some places bears are harder to tree than others.
My buddies and houndsmen in the East would find a
reality out there that's way different, and they typically need
more dogs to consistently tree bears.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
But you know, there is something I'd like to say
that I haven't hundred hounds since well one hundred. With
Jim Bridges. One on one time up in Susanville that
was nineteen ninety five, we caught a bear and let
it go, of course, but I didn't. I haven't had
hound since the late nineteen eighties, and I kind of
(43:45):
burned myself out.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
How long did you? Just to give an overview? So
you started, you started guiding in what year and ended
in what year?
Speaker 4 (43:55):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (43:55):
I started guiding in nineteen sixty six and in nineteen
late nineteen seventies I quit guiding. I didn't quit hunting,
I quit guiding.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Ed's story of struggles starting from zero and ascending to
becoming an expert in his field is interesting and inspiring,
But the thing that stands out to me is simple.
It's just hard work to be good at anything. Everyone
has challenges to overcome, and it's in those challenges that
(44:30):
we find who we are. Challenge gives us identity. How
we deal with those challenges determines what our name is.
It's my hope that we never lose grit, determination, and
drive towards the things that seem most out of reach
to us. What I didn't hear inside of Ed's story
was excuses. Today it seems like a lot of people
(44:53):
have a lot of excuses, including me at times, but
I refuse to let those things define me on a
lot of inspiration from Ed's story, and I hope you
have too. You can find this book by searching for
Trained by a Hound Dog by d Vance.
Speaker 3 (45:11):
I really thank ed for this.
Speaker 2 (45:13):
Story, and don't forget California completely lost their rights to
hunt lions and run bears with hounds. We can't ever
take for granted what we've got. We're living in the
glory days, and we've got to continue to fight for
our rights.
Speaker 3 (45:31):
As hunters and conservationists.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
I can't thank you enough for listening to bear grease
to Brent's This Country Life podcast Into Lakes Backwoods University.
Keep the wild places wild because that's where the bears live.
Next thing I knew I was I was so so
dog going for I was hurting for money so bad
that i'd coast home. I'd find when I'd be driving home,
I turned the motor off so I didn't burn the
gas trop going down hill. That and next thing I
knew that I could leave the motor running used to
get home.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And you were catching so many lines you could leave
the motor running when I was riding down the road
going down the hill.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
YE made it.
Speaker 4 (00:28):
Yeah, Yeah, I was really getting riched.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
This is the story of Houndsman Advance in his twenty
five years guiding and hunting lions and bears in California.
He started as a suburban kid in the nineteen forties
with no connection to hounds or hunting, but would go on,
as he says, to be trained by a hound dog.
Ed published a book by that title in twenty nineteen,
(00:55):
and some time ago I traveled out to California to
hear his story of struggle, per severance, and success firsthand.
This story examines the drive of a young man to succeed.
I really doubt that you're going to want to miss
this one. My name is Clay Knukem, and this is
(01:22):
the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant,
search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell
the story of Americans who live their lives close to
the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American made purpose built
hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged
(01:45):
as the place as we explore. I'm in Posey, California,
two and a half hours from Los Angeles, in the
southern one third of the state, at the southern tip
of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It was a time when
(02:07):
California was the place to be if you wanted to
hunt big game with hounds.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
This place is gorgeous. This isn't what I expected.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
From this property.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
I caught lions and bears all over everything.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
All of the stuff that you can see.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Advance points to a black hide draped over a couch.
It's the only hide in this house. He's not going
to tell me a story. He's going to show it
to me.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
That was one of the toughest bears that I'd ever
got my dogs after. I mean, I'd had others that
were just as bad. But because there's the right here,
I'm going to explain to you, and I'm going to
show you where it started, where it went to, and
where it ended from.
Speaker 4 (02:57):
Right here at this house.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Ed's home sits on top of a scrub oak covered
hill with a stunning three hundred and sixty degree view.
I envisioned this is what the mountainous regions of Kenya
look like. There are yellow, parched grasslands on big rolling mountains,
Emerald green oaks with round canopies stand alone dotting the
landscape like the dark rosettes of a jaguar.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
The hills flow with the smooth.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Lines like that of a cat's shoulders hips and the
swooping tail like the deep valleys. Fully wooded and steep
rimrock bluffs break up the terrain in places. It's the
kind of place you feel like you need a horse.
This is some unusual and beautiful country. Ed points across
a deep valley, and to the east is a long
(03:48):
ridge that dominates the landscape.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
This particular bear that I got out after it was
in it started him in October and it was just
at the crack of dawn, and so we stopped and
I said, I'm going to walk up a canyon and
see if I can get a bear started up there,
and I'm going to show you where this is at.
You see this bridge right in front of him, So
(04:13):
you see a lone tree standing up there all by myself. Yeah,
from that tree, if you went straight down into the canyon,
straight down into the bottom, that's where they started this bear.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
By my best guess, they jumped the bear three miles
from Ed's back porch. This hunt took place in the
early nineteen seventies, but the landscape doesn't look much different
now than then there because that's been burned.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
They pulled him out of that cannon. He came out
of that canyon, crossed onto this side of that ridge,
and he skirted that ridge almost on the top all
the way around, and then where you can see that
one high point, he turned and he went to the
opposite side of it. Now there was no roads to
speak of, and so I was following him on foot.
(05:02):
By the time I got to there, I could hear
those dogs. It was placed called Portuguese Pass, and Portuguese
Pass is the furthest ridge that you can see.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Yeah, I see over there as.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Far as you can see, and he's just about to
go over.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
And I thought, if he goes over.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
That so there's a big valley in between that.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
It's called bull Run Basin. The other side is called
bull Run Basin.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Anyways, Portuguese Pass is seven thousand feet in elevation. It
looks to be six or seven miles from where we're standing.
But the bear keeps running and Ed was following the
dogs by sound. This was thirty years before GPS, when
you turn dogs loose with just a leather collar on
their neck.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
And they were Then he was moving and and these
dogs were were hitting it as hard as they could,
and that is like extremely steep and rough. Yeah, and
then I lost hearing of them. Now we're gonna have
to walk to another spot over then I'm gonna shows
you where this thing ended up at.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
We walked forty yards to the north side of Ed's house,
and the panoramic story continues so far. We can see
every rock step he and the dogs covered.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
So I came down through all of that, and it's
late in the afternoon. Now, I keep in mind this
started at about six in the morning, late in the afternoon,
which would be about I'm gonna say about three o'clock.
I crossed this road right here, the road that I'm
living on. But I was about four miles up and
I took my CBE radio and I to see if
(06:42):
anybody was there. And so this friend of mine, it
had been honey with me, he wasn't. I didn't even
know he was going to be up for this David.
When I triggered my mic on my CV radio, Lewis
answered and he asked where I was at, and I
told him. By then, the dogs had traveled at least
ten twelve miles through this steep terrain that you're looking at.
(07:05):
And I says, have you heard my dogs? And he says, yes,
your dogs. The last I heard him, He says, your
dogs are down on White River by the campground. Now,
I'm going to show you a White River campground.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
Is that We got a walk.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Now we walk to the west side of the house,
and far in the distance is a long ridge. It's
hard to imagine traveling this far on foot in a
single day.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
He wanted to come and pick me up, and I says, no,
I want to just go across the country. I'm just
gonna keep it's all downhill, and I can travel pretty
fast going downhill, And as long as I know that
that's where they're at and I says, so I'm going
to go drop down to on what's called bear Trot Ridge.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
This is bear Trot Fridge right to our.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Right from Lewis this time, you've already traveled twelve fourteen
miles close to that, through through air miles, and so
we're going down in these steep valleys and ravines and
up mountains.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yes, because where the bear was started was at the
five thousand foot elevation and Portuguese passes seven thousand.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
Wow, So they almost got He almost had to.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
You had to go.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
You had to lose elevation and gain it.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
And many times yes, yes, back and forth, back and forth.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
This trek would have to push the limits of an
elite athlete for a day's travel. But there's an ancient
adrenaline download. When a man is following his hounds, emphasis
on his hounds, it can produce a superhuman drive. Ed
describes how he crossed a big valley heading towards the
White River and he could now hear the dogs barking
(08:47):
every breath, but this bear just won't tree. He knew
this bear, and he knew that it wouldn't trill.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
He was getting close to cross and over and I
got to where I could drop down, and I came
head on onto him and we walked right into each other.
When he saw me, he spun and I had.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
This far with the dogs behind him.
Speaker 4 (09:09):
They weren't behind him, they were all right alongside of him.
They were right on him. Yeah, they're just walking, yes,
but they knew.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
You don't a dog didn't dare taking and put his
mouth on that bear.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
They knew with his three or four dogs swarming, the
bear edge shoots as it spins, but misses the mark.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
And he took off.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
And if you'll see that farthest ridge that we can
see over there in the in the distance, I got
my next shot at him, and I was almost at
the bottom between those two ridges. In fact, there's some
ranchers said they was listening to the whole thing. Oh wow,
And I shot and killed him right there.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
So how many miles it is, I don't know, but
I do know this. I had twenty minutes to get
the height off of him, and there's going to be dark.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
That's an incredible feed for the has been an incredible
feat for a man.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
Man.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
How far do you think you went?
Speaker 3 (10:05):
I mean really in miles?
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Actually, Yeah, there was a dirt trail and I was
walking it twenty five twenty five miles, I think.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Gaining I've never heard while I saw such a panoramic
story where you could see such distance from the same hilltop,
and I'd say, this is a good introduction to advance.
I'd like to tell you how I met him. I'd
say it was quite unusual for me.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Several months ago.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
It was probably Lynnette that contacted me and said, I'd
like to send you a book that my husband wrote.
And I said, well, sure, And I get a lot
of books.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Ed, I really do a lot of people. A lot
of people write books, and I read a lot of books.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
And when I read this book, I could tell that
the voice of this writer was someone special. I really did,
and I as I read the book, I thought, man,
I'd like to meet that guy.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
And so anyway, thank you for host you welcome.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
We're sure you're happy to have you here.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
But it's an incredible and beautiful place.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
We're on the southern southern tip of the Sierra Nevadas
in a mountain range known as the Greenhorn Mountains, and
Sequoyan National Forest and Sequoi National Monument is right on
these Greenhorn Mountains. It's the place that a lot of
people really don't know about.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Well, this morning we started often. I mean we were
in Los Angeles, Yes, Los Angeles, California. Seven lane going
one way, seven lane traffic going the other, and we
drove two and a half hours, and I mean we're
twenty miles from a gas station.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
I mean we're here more than that.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
More than that, we're in your wilderness.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
Really, you're forty miles away from the gas station.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
For all the negative press California he gets, this place
is a natural wonder with an order of geologic and
biologic diversity greater than any state. It's no wonder people
flocked here. I wanted to ask ed how he got
into hound hunting.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
You know, I always as a kid.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
I grew up in a suburb for the town by
the name of Glendale in California. And in those days,
of course, the population wasn't what it was today, and
I kind of liked the act, like I was hunting
him because of it. Right from our house, you just
go off in the hills they're just covered with brush,
just to kind of make believe, you know. But over
(12:38):
time I drifted away from that and then I found
myself working at an assembly plant for Chevrolet in Van Eys, California,
and directly across the line from me was a guy
by the name Sherwood Barrett. He was from Georgia, and
in Sherwood he was a Mormon, and he told me,
he says that he left Georgia and he's on his
(13:00):
way to Salt Lake City, and uh, because he wanted
to live there, but he had to get go someplace
and earn some money in the process, and so he
was I was putting gas lines, gasoline lines on these
cars as they passed through fifty something an hour, so
we'd get a few moments every now and then to visit.
And he started telling me about chasing these hound dogs
(13:21):
in the Oki Finok Swamp in Georgia, and uh, it
really caught my interests. I mean it really did.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
And the next were down there, they're hunting hunting coons,
hunting coons, yeah, yep.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
And uh so anyways, he tell me these stories about
this but what he was doing, and it just really
caught my interest, and so I asked him, I said, sure,
where would you where do you go to buy these dogs?
And he told me says, go to like outdoor life.
They had these guys advertising. I didn't know at the
time that most of those guys were selling dogs that
(13:55):
nobody wanted, you know, and people like myself would buy
them because I didn't know what I was buying in
the first place. So anyways, I started with that.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
And what was your intention?
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Was your intention to run lion or bear?
Speaker 1 (14:09):
I just wanted I like dogs, and I liked the
idea of hunting and a honeywood dogs sounding it could.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
So you would have been in your early twenties probably
at this.
Speaker 4 (14:17):
Time I was. I was.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
I just wanted some hunting dogs.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
I was like twenty years old, yeah, and nobody in
my family had ever even heard of it. And so
I wed Heed a dog from him, and I got
a red bone hound and his nice looking dog actually
called him Buck.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Buck was shipped in a wooden crate by rail from
a kindle in Arkansas, and he paid thirty five dollars
for the dog and another thirty five for the shipping.
This first dog purchase coincided with a complete lifestyle change.
Is Ed moved to the city of Ohigh in rural California,
where he bought some horses and got a job working
(14:57):
at a self service gas station or sixty to seventy
hours a week to cover his expenses. But he was
about to meet somebody that would change his life.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
So I got this dog and didn't know where to
go hunting. So I took off and I went up
in the mountains up by Ventura, which is just covered
with brushia I actually have a terrible place to try
and hunt dogs, and I never caught anything with him.
And then I started meeting different guys that had hound dogs,
and they weren't doing any good either, and so I
(15:31):
fooled around with those, and eventually I learned that what
these dogs were chasing was not anything they could climb
a tree at all. That the guys I was hunting
with they were chasing deers. What they were chasing, you know.
So the time went by, and next thing I knew,
I was introduced to a guy out of Utah by
the name of Willis Butteov, which was a very well
(15:53):
known government hunter and had caught hundreds of lions, unbelievable
numbers of life. So I got with him and hunted
with him a few times and bought a few dogs
from him. From there I started learning about the difference
between hunting dogs and taking dogs hunting and catching stuff,
(16:14):
and so then from there I ended up losing a
couple of these dogs to ten eighty poison, which was
terrible situation that was in Utah.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Ed wanted a dog that would treat mountain lions, and
after a couple of years of messing around with dogs
running deer, in nineteen sixty two, he drove seven hundred
miles one way in his nineteen fifty one gmc three
quarter ton pickup to meet a man named Willis Butov
in Utah. Can you imagine driving a truck like that
(16:47):
that far? Ed was in his twenties and had never
treated a single animal with his hound. In the book,
he describes arriving at Buttev's house visiting for several hours
before he he asked the man, when was the last
time you treat a lion? Ed wrote quote. He paused
(17:07):
for a minute and appeared as though he was trying
to remember back in time, and then he said today.
Buttev had killed the lion that very day and couldn't
remember it, and he had the hide saltan on the
back porch. Turns out Buttov had over four hundred and
fifty documented lion kills in Utah as a government hunter
(17:29):
during the bounty years. He was the real deal and
Ed was finally in the right place. Their relationship would
last many years, and Ed bought several young dogs from
him that never really worked out. A couple of years
after their initial meeting, Ed made the trip again to
Utah to hunt with Buttov, and while in the mountains,
(17:52):
they got word that Buttev's father had passed away in
sun Danced, Wyoming, And to kind of show you what
kind of man Ed was, Ed volunteered to drive Buttov
seven hundred miles one way to the funeral in his
new four wheel drive International Scout in the dead of winter.
Ed remembers they had to cover themselves with blankets while
(18:14):
they drove so they didn't freeze. The entire trip, they
talked about dogs. Ed was eating up every second he
had with Buttov, and what Buttov didn't know is that
Ed had taken out a thousand dollars loan with the
hopes to buy one of Buttov's lead dogs, not a
young one, but a fully trained lion hound, And on
(18:37):
the fourteen hundred mile trip, he agreed to sell Ed
one of his top hounds. Ed finally had a legit
lion hound. But listen to this, tragically and literally, the
first time that Ed turned the dog loose after paying
one thousand dollars for it, it was killed by TIS
(19:00):
eighty poison sodium flora acetate. This stuff was used to
kill ground squirrels and predators in California, and dogs that
would even find the dead carcass killed by the poison,
they themselves would get poisoned.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
And was devastated.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
So he again was back in the business of looking
for yet another dog. It was now nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
And then I ended up meeting a guy that he
worked for a big farm out of Wasco, California, and
he said that people told me that he had a
hound that he might sell because of his age. I
got in touch with him. Guy's names J. D. Reynolds,
and he had this red tick hound that he said
he would sell, and I bought him, and I couldn't
(19:51):
believe what I had bought. I went from this from
not catching anything to speak of. So every time I
put that dog's foot on the ground, he caught something
and he didn't run deer. He didn't run coyotes, and
he caught bobcats and raccoons and foxes every time he
(20:11):
hit the ground practically. And from there I started learning
the difference between good dogs, mediocre dogs, and dogs that
just aren't any good. So on the book that I
titled Trained by a Hound Dog, the title was really
thinking about this dog, this red takeown.
Speaker 4 (20:28):
Which we called Bo.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Like I say, he was six years old when I
got him. I was working as a carpenter framing houses
in Thousand Oaks, California, where framing houses there as a
carpenter was more like an athletic contest than it was
anything else, because it's all piece work and you didn't
get paid much. If you're going to have any money
at all, you're gonna work like you're fighting fire from
(20:51):
the moment she got there until there's time to go home,
which I did, and I take and load bow up
on Friday nights and I head off from the Ventura,
California to the Greenhorn Mountains, which is where we're at
right now, and which is where Bo was. Ray who
actually trained. He came from Arkansas. He was a red
(21:12):
de count out of the Elbert Vaughan stock of English hounds,
which eventually to be canting the Elber Blue tich.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
If you're into hounds, you probably recognize the name Elbert Vaughan,
who made quite the mark on the Bluetick breed. But
the most compelling part of this story is the examination
of a young man's drive to succeed, starting from absolute
zero in the suburbs. It took him four years, a
lifestyle change, thousands of miles of travel. He went through
(21:44):
about ten dogs, countless dead ends, some of them tragic
and out of his control. But finally he got started
with this hound named bow Whatever you do in life,
it's going to take some work and there will be pain.
He had any of excuses to quit.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
I think that first year I'd get off work and
I'd drive all the way up here, which was three
and a half to four hours each way, after working
all all week. And I think that first year I
had Bowen and I bought a plot hound. I called
him Pat, and he was like two years old when
I got him. Bo wouldn't run a line at all.
(22:23):
He wouldn't I'd find a line track is fresh, and
he wouldn't pay any attention. But Pat had been on
some lions. I got Pat from Willis Putev in Utah,
and he'd been on these lions, so he he was
eager more eager to try and trail. And then Boa
was Bo didn't care. I think I caught on Friday
(22:44):
night hunting Friday nights and Saturday right out one hundred
animals that first year. And that was driving four hours
each way to go after putting in five days of
slave labor type work. You know, which of is basically
bobcats and foxes with So.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
They'd treat these foxes and these little oak trees.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
They do tree here there.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
It's called a grave cross fox. They're a lot harder
to tree than the bobcats are.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Starting from zero, Ed was now on his way, and
what would happen with Bo is that after Pat the
plot started trailing lions, Bo joined him and the pair
became an extraordinary team catching lions. But when you get
into hounds, it starts a never ending cycle of always
needing more dogs. So he hit the road again, driving
(23:31):
to Arkansas to meet with the blue tick breeder Albert Vaughan,
where he picked up some hounds that would become instrumental
in his pack for years to come. Ed and his
pack started treating lions and bears consistently, which led Ed
to want to change professions and become a full time
lion and bear outfitter.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
I started advertising. I'd hurt my back really bad in
framing houses, and I I just couldn't. I couldn't and
keep doing it. So I left Ventura and I moved
to this area where we're out here. That was in
nineteen sixty six. When I moved here, I've been keeping mind,
had been hunting it for about three or four.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Years, been.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Traveling back and forth. But I moved here full time.
Started running some ads in the magazine, like Outdoor Life magazine,
fifty dollars a month for a one tolam inch ad.
And it was it was just about broke me to
have to pay that advertisement, you know, And I was
I was so poor. I was poor as a church mouse,
(24:34):
as a sands go you know, living in the back
of my truck at the same time. But anyways, I
rented an old shack, moved into that, started advertising and
I started getting some customers.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Ed bought a typewriter at a pawn shop and started
printing out brochures for his lion hunts that he hung
all across town. For a successful lion hunt, he charged
five hundred dollars, and if they treat a bobcat, it
was an extra fifty. It was now in nineteen sixty six,
and only three years prior, the bounty on Mountain lions
was stopped and lions were being managed as game animals.
(25:12):
Ed got his California guide license, which was nothing more
than a formality, and he was on his way. But
in the late fall of nineteen sixty seven, something beyond
his control happened.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
And it started to grow from there, you know, and
then I ended up having a I guess people started
knowing a little bit about me being there. And I
knew this guy lived up at Sugarloa Village, and he
said that he knew a guy that worked for the
La Times, and he talked to him about what I
was doing, and they wanted to know if they could
(25:46):
come up here and I'd take him lying under they'd
run an article in the Los Angeles Times, so you know,
I said, well, yeah, okay, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
And this was obviously a time when was a little
more favorable to hunt lions California.
Speaker 4 (26:00):
Yes, it was so.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Anyways, these guys came up, the guy named Dewey Lindsay,
and with him was this photographer that worked for the
He's a freelance photographer basically worked for a national geographic
And here I am twenty five years old with about
three hound dogs, and I got these high powered professionals
from Los Amps that come up here and want me
(26:24):
to catch a lion. They said, I only got three
days to do it. In the pressure was really on
because trying to you know, there's one thing to catch
a lion. Well, you're just out there hunting and you
run into them and you catch him as a as
they become available. But if you're going to do this
as a profession and you got people coming in and
you're on a no catch, no pay.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
Which I was at those days, no catch, no pay,
no catch, no pay. If you didn't catch it, you
didn't get paid anything.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Was that common back then or is that just something
that you wanted to.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
No, No, that was common. That was the way it
was everywhere, all of them through the mount in states.
Everybody no catch, no pay. You had to show for
these people around and pay for their food and sometimes
drive a couple hundred miles each way to an airport
to pick them up and take them back. And if
you didn't catch them a lion, you didn't get paid anything.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
So that's business.
Speaker 4 (27:17):
The pressure was on, you know.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
Made for some good outfitters, didn't it.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
It separated them, It truly did. Yeah, I caught them
a lion on the on the third day.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Third day, and you're just dry ground line hunting, so
you're just roaming around free casting the dogs. No, were
you on your horse at that.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
No, I didn't know. I wasn't using horse. What what
I'd have to do is I just had to go
places where I knew that lions would frequent and and
you know, they're they're kind of a strange animal in
that you find lions that would use certain areas and
airs are close by. They wouldn't even go and bother
over there. So I would go to these places where
(27:59):
I knew that it either caught lions already or I'd
seen lions. I was really looking for someplace where I
could find a lion track, knowing that I hadn't already
caught the thing.
Speaker 4 (28:12):
So anyways, we ended.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Up catching the lion and they they ran this story
in the What's we call West magazine to the Los
Angeles Time. It's a weekend color magazine, and through that ad,
it generated quite a bit of a business for me.
Next thing I knew I was I was so so
dog gone for I was hurting for money so bad
(28:34):
that i'd coast home. I'd find when I'd be driving home,
I turned the motor off so I didn't burn the
gas for it going downhill. But and next thing I
knew that I could leave the motor running needs to
get home.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
And you were catching some eighty lines. You could leave
the motors running when I start riding down the road.
That's right going down the hill.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Ye made it?
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Yeah, Yeah, I was really getting rich during the years
that I did all this. I wouldn't trade the memories
of that for anything at all. I mean, it was
just something that was just really important to me, and
(29:13):
I cherished those memories a dozen years there. I made
my living from that. If I had two nickels to
rub together, it was because somebody gave me that for
taking a hunting, And if they gave it to me
for taking a hunting, it's because they got the animal
that they were hunting for. Or they didn't give me
the two nickels, you know. But I'll tell you what.
Speaker 4 (29:34):
I was so poor. It took every penny.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
That I made to feed those dogs, buy new ones
if I needed to buy a dog, pay for gas.
Trucks didn't last very long in those days. Seventy thousand
miles on a truck that I was driving new, buy
one brand new, and then seventy thousand.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
Miles later it was pretty rough shape.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
So anyways, from there, I stayed in California, Yah, doing
the line of the bear, and I took the I
started hunting bears in northern California. I'd run into a
guy and his two boys, and it was nineteen sixty six,
it was December twenty seventh, I think, and we caught
(30:16):
this lion, but we got a flat tire and we
were just about ready to leave, and we're right at
the end of the dead end road. Anyways, at the
end of the road, couldn't be five hundred feet away
from us. I look down the road and there's these
two boys standing there with four hound dogs and asked
Roy Stevenson. I said, do you know those kids? He says,
(30:36):
I've never seen him in my life. And there was
a friendship that is still going on today. The two
boys was Bobby Bridges and Gary Bridges and their father,
Jim Bridges, who's now passed on, and we hit it
off really well. So next thing I knew, I was
up there taking bear hunts and Shatta County and Jim
Bridges was giving me a hand at it, and I
(30:58):
ended up buying three of those dogs that were standing
at the end of the road that day. Jim was
one of the actually one of the finest men that
I think I've ever known in my life. You could
believe anything he said, and you can't find any of
them that you can do that with.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
You never know when you're going to meet a friend
that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
Ed met the Bridges at the end of a dead
end road. I really like Ed's qualification of a good man.
He said you could believe anything he said, which puzzled
me for a minute at how rare Ed implied this
trait to be. But I think a lot of people
(31:37):
just tell you what you want to hear. They may
not lie to you, but they don't tell you the
whole truth. And some people just aren't competent, and what
they say is often flawed, not reflecting reality. It's not
that they blatantly lie, it's just you can't really trust
their judgment. It made me stop and ask what integrity
(31:59):
really is. It's a powerful exercise to do a deep
analysis of your personal integrity, and only you, with the
help of God, can do that.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
I wanted to ask ed about horses.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
I know in your book you talk about and this
is one thing that intrigued me. Was you hunted on
horseback a lot? Was that one of your favorite ways
to hunt ed was hunting on horseback with the dog's
free ranging out.
Speaker 4 (32:33):
I did enjoy that.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
It was you know, the easiest way to hunt dogs
is to turn the dogs loose and let him run
down the road in front of a pick out and
follo him in a truck. But in lion hunting, sometimes
with what I was doing, see, I couldn't catch lines
at just my leisure. It didn't make any difference. If
I was out there and caught a line, I didn't
have anyone with me. I didn't do any good. I
(32:57):
didn't get paid anything, and I was full time doing this,
so I needed a paying customer to be with me
and a paying customer had to be there.
Speaker 4 (33:06):
When I caught it. Yeah, I mean I could catch it.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
I could catch the line the day after the guy left,
and it didn't do me any good because he left
and he took his money with him when he was
when he left. You know, So during those years I
had to go wherever the lions were at. It's like
most of the hunts were like one week hunts, and
during that week period of time, I had to come
up with the lion. And if I didn't come up
(33:29):
with the lion, I just got to I just got
to pay the bill all by myself.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
You know, did that happen very often? Or did you
catch most most people lines?
Speaker 1 (33:36):
You know, I was running of both the line, the
both line and barns. I was hitting pretty close to
ninety percent, which meant you if you had if you
had a guy on a lion hunt, you didn't get
much time to do that. So you better know where
there's one at. And so to do that, I had
to stay active, actively looking, even if I had nobody
(33:59):
with me. Well here comes the horse now, Okay. I
drive roads. I look for tracks alongside the roads, walks
and trails. But you can only walk so far. Then
there's other areas that you know that are pretty decent
for having lions in them. But it didn't do you
any good to go way back in the back country.
If you're going to take what we used to call
them dudes, take them in there to go catch a line,
(34:21):
because you had to get them in there too, you know.
So I would take and I'd use the horse to
scout to constantly look see if I could find a line.
If I caught them, i'd make sure i'd let them go,
but try and keep tract of it so that you
could hopefully find it again, which wasn't all that often.
I seemed like I'd guess lines, let them go, and
I never seem to see their tracks again. But anyways,
(34:45):
how many did I catch as compared to driving roads?
I caught more driving roads just because you can travel.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
Fast, just it's an efficient way to hunt.
Speaker 4 (34:54):
It is you can travel much faster.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
You're looking for an actual track, yes, dirt track in
the road.
Speaker 4 (34:59):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Lions, At least where I was hunting them, they seemed
to use trails. They were obvious to you. You get
to the point to where you could you could you
find a lion track. You're walking up a canyon, you
find a lion track, and just going a certain direction,
you look off in the distance.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
You could just about say, if this lion.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Has gone that far whatever that is, a mile or
whatever it is, the chances are he went right through there, and.
Speaker 4 (35:26):
You almost look, yes, you almost always right.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
And the and the bears at that time in these
Greenhorn Mountains, which is where we're at, the bear pop
place was very poor. They'd had had a drought, a
severe drought in the late nineteen fifties. They said that
the bears went clear to the San Joaquin Valley in
those years. And in those years they were using the
(35:52):
poison called ten eighty to kill ground squirrels and everything else.
And ten eighty is a kind of a poison that
if a ground squirrel eat and something comes along and
eats the ground squirrel, it's going to kill that thing too.
And I kind of think that between the drought and
the widespread poisoning ground squirrels in these mountains, that had
(36:13):
just about wiped the bear population now for a long,
long waist away, And it wasn't until about nineteen sixty eight,
which would be about ten years after that drought that
we started spinning bears showing up. Yeah, and the bears
that we've would show up, they were adults, they were
all and most of our big, big bears to boots.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
You know.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
It weren't finding anything of females with cubs. They're just
pretty good sized bears, and I think they just moved
into here. But up until then, up until about nineteen seventy,
I was spending all my time for the bear on
south in northern California.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
What Ed is saying checks out, because males will be
the first ones to repopulate new territory. And interestingly, as
many know today, California has the most bears of any
state in the lower forty eight. The last half century
for black bears has surprised biologists by how quickly they
can come back.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
That's a good thing. And back to horse hunting.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Ed had a really cool truck with a stock crack
and the bed built in dog boxes that he hauled
his horses and dogs without a trailer.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
I've been watting one of those ever since I saw
his What was your favorite to chase with your hounds?
Speaker 4 (37:30):
I love chasing bears.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
Did you more than lions?
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Oh, that's hard to say. I'll tell you what I
liked about about the lion hunt. I really did enjoy
catching a lion where the dogs would start with a track.
There was almost nothing were they'd out there, and you
had to have dogs had good cold noses to where
they'd done. You find a lion track in the dirt
(37:54):
and you point out it, and they stick their nose
down there. They couldn't smell it, but they knew you
were pointing something out. They started looking. They'd find a
twig that had touched that animal side and they could
smell it on that twig, and they'd bark. And you
look at the ground where they're at, and there's that
lion's track, and you start from that, and maybe ten
(38:15):
miles later you're looking at the lion. That to me
made it all worthwhile. That was that was hunting dogs.
That wasn't hunting lions. That was taking dogs and seeing
them at their very finest, and I just loved that.
I know, there's lots of lines that I'd caught people
(38:35):
that I'd taken in the past. After writing this book,
they'd asked me about it, and I forgot all about
it because they were what we call a pop ups.
You know, you cut the track and it was fresh. Yeah,
a lie wasn't very far away from.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
You, So that was the easy one.
Speaker 4 (38:50):
Those Areasi's pop ups.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
You don't even forget about them, but those ones that
where you get out out to those things. Then you
go all day long just working, sometimes in the summertime
where the dog just just taking both of you. You
got to find the track to help the dog, and
the dog take the track a little ways where you
couldn't find it, and next thing you know, they turned
that thing into a movable track and like, say, miles later,
(39:14):
you're looking at it, there is a tree.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
One thing that you did, and this I noticed inside
the book was you did some incredible athletic feats. In
my mind following these dogs. Were you a really great athlete?
Speaker 4 (39:29):
Ed No.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
As a matter of fact, as an infant, I had
to berkulosis, and they figured that I would never be
able to do anything athleticalized. But then i'd also had
learned that your lungs can repair, and.
Speaker 4 (39:46):
Apparently mine did.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
Yeah, and you know I would go places that following
a hound dog. I wouldn't even think of going there.
But it was because the dogs and I were doing
this together. Let me put it like this, but the
numbers of lines that I caught, I left let a
lot of them go, just let them go. Same with bears.
I let hundreds of bears go. I mean hundreds. It
(40:10):
was all about dog honting. There's a lot of times,
you know, I keep telling myself, no paint, no gain,
you know, But if I could hear those dogs, I'm
going to them. And there was one time in my
entire career that my dogs treat a bear and I
(40:32):
didn't go to him. I started to go to him,
but I had two guys with me. This is up
in Shasta County. They treat a bear in this place
called Hellsol that's with the name of that canyon. And
that canyon is so steep that you had to hang
on to stuff as you're going downhill, otherwise you're going
to just start sliding.
Speaker 4 (40:51):
Then you go all the way to the bottom.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
And from where the where we started, the bear, they
dropped off in a canyon that is about fifteen hundred
feet in elevation into the bottom of straight down and
treated about a thousand feet up the other side. And
we started going down to these dogs that had two
guys with me. One of them was really heavy set,
and I knew that Hugh was never going to get there.
(41:15):
The dogs were just blowing the top out of this
tree and across the canyon. From where we were standing
to where those dogs were actually trim we could not
have been a thousand feet through the air apart from
each other. And so I asked these guys, I said,
what's going to happen if we get to the bottom,
(41:36):
you're going to be able to get back to the
up to the top, because if you can't, there's no
sense going down there. And they told me, they says,
we'll never make it. So I started yelling and I
fired my rifle a couple of times, and it's really
surprised me. I don't remember how many dogs I had,
and I probably I usually I usually had about four.
I liked to during the embarrassed season, I like to
(41:59):
have no less them three and usually about four.
Speaker 4 (42:02):
I'd rotate the dog.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
You could catch dogs. You can catch bears with three,
four or five hounds.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Yes, yeah, I'll tell you a little about my philosophy
on that. But anyways, the dogs came to me and
I was totally shocked that they quit and came across
that canyon. But as we got out of there, you know,
(42:30):
when it comes to numbers of dogs, Willi's butt off.
He's a lion. He was a guy of excuse, went
to god. He was a government hunter, but he also
guided people as well, and he's he trapped for coyotes.
He uses dogs for lions and bears. Stop killing lions
and bears. And he told me early on, he said,
(42:51):
if you have three or four dogs that can't catch
a bear, you don't need more, you need new ones.
Speaker 4 (42:59):
Yeah, on that to be true.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
What Ed is saying isn't wrong. But as you take
a wider look at America, every region is different, and
in some places bears are harder to tree than others.
My buddies and houndsmen in the East would find a
reality out there that's way different, and they typically need
more dogs to consistently tree bears.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
But you know, there is something I'd like to say
that I haven't hundred hounds since well one hundred. With
Jim Bridges. One on one time up in Susanville that
was nineteen ninety five, we caught a bear and let
it go, of course, but I didn't. I haven't had
hound since the late nineteen eighties, and I kind of
(43:45):
burned myself out.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
How long did you? Just to give an overview? So
you started, you started guiding in what year and ended
in what year?
Speaker 4 (43:55):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (43:55):
I started guiding in nineteen sixty six and in nineteen
late nineteen seventies I quit guiding. I didn't quit hunting,
I quit guiding.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Ed's story of struggles starting from zero and ascending to
becoming an expert in his field is interesting and inspiring,
But the thing that stands out to me is simple.
It's just hard work to be good at anything. Everyone
has challenges to overcome, and it's in those challenges that
(44:30):
we find who we are. Challenge gives us identity. How
we deal with those challenges determines what our name is.
It's my hope that we never lose grit, determination, and
drive towards the things that seem most out of reach
to us. What I didn't hear inside of Ed's story
was excuses. Today it seems like a lot of people
(44:53):
have a lot of excuses, including me at times, but
I refuse to let those things define me on a
lot of inspiration from Ed's story, and I hope you
have too. You can find this book by searching for
Trained by a Hound Dog by d Vance.
Speaker 3 (45:11):
I really thank ed for this.
Speaker 2 (45:13):
Story, and don't forget California completely lost their rights to
hunt lions and run bears with hounds. We can't ever
take for granted what we've got. We're living in the
glory days, and we've got to continue to fight for
our rights.
Speaker 3 (45:31):
As hunters and conservationists.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
I can't thank you enough for listening to bear grease
to Brent's This Country Life podcast Into Lakes Backwoods University.
Keep the wild places wild because that's where the bears live.
Host
Clay Newcomb
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