Full Cry Column
July 2002

Clint Stubbe (Northern Working Airedale Terrier Association correspondent)

As I write this June has just arrived but certain days these last few weeks have felt more like October. The snow is quite late in leaving the high country this year and I won't be getting into some of the really high stuff for a few weeks yet. This has been a particularly cool and wet spring but the gardens in and bear season is in full swing now providing lots of opportunity to get the dogs on game. Bear hunting is nothing if not exciting but it can be hard on dogs and bear season is the only time of year I wish I had more dogs around. My Bar (Slim/Brisk) recently tore or pulled a shoulder muscle on a bear race putting him out of action for a bit while a fellow I know North of here had two nice young Walkers killed by a bear this spring.
Billy Harkins of Blairsville Georgia knows something about getting dogs beat up and he sent me a couple emails of some hunts he's been on this spring.
"Clint here's the low down on two of my latest bear ventures.
Friday of last week I thought I would get my dogs out for some exercise. I had talked with my cousin Doug and he had planned to meet with me and get his dogs out and do the same. Well cousin Doug never showed up at the appointed time so I went on anyway.
The area where I hunt is national Forest and it's pretty remote (for my area) there is about a two and a half mile drive in till the end of the road. Well I only had three dogs with me Steel, Lucy and my cur / bulldog cross Boozer. I let Steel and Boozer out at the beginning of the road so they could work off some of there excess energy.
I have had them on the chain for a while and so I wanted to start getting them in shape to hog hunt this summer in central Georgia.
Well when I got to the end of the road the dog's tongues were hanging out but they seemed to be enjoying themselves.
And since I was there I figured that I would check on the local game population. I got my tracker and backpack and headed out on an old logging road with the dogs to see if I could find a hog or bear track. I hadn't gone maybe fifty or sixty yards and Boozer and Lucy who were along side me headed up the ridge with their noses to the ground. I was hunting all the dogs loose and Steel had taken off on another fork in the road. In about five minutes Lucy and Boozer come back so I started hollering for Steel and in a minute or so he come to me. I took him up the ridge and he picked up the track right away and went on with it. I pulled on up to the top of the ridge to listen and Lucy and Boozer came on with me. When I got to the top I just stopped to listen and catch my breath. In a few minutes Steel opened up and Lucy and Boozer tore strait down the ridge full speed. I set and listened a while to see what they would do and some times I just like to listen and take it all in, I guess it must be old age setting in.
After I was rested I headed on to them to see what they had. They seemed to be less than a quarter mile from me and were talking to it pretty good. I crossed a small branch and headed up a laurel ridge and the bear must have winded me and he broke and ran across the ridge. I found where they had had him treed and saw the track and it was a small one.
When I got to the top of the ridge I heard them on the other side and down from where I was treeing every breath. So I headed down the ridge and it started getting thicker the closer I got to them. I ended up having to crawl to them through the ivy thickets.
When I got to them I tried to slip in real quite before the bear could see me. The foliage is getting pretty thick already and I had to get close. When I was about thirty yards from the tree I saw the bear about ten feet up with three dogs going crazy. He must have seen me and out he came and the race was on again. The little bear must have treed twelve or fifteen times in a two-mile stretch.
But I was only able to see him the one time. After about an hour and a half the dogs got give out and came back and I'm glad that they did cause I was about busted myself.
Lucy had taken a hard hit in her front shoulder but the other dogs were fine.
Now the two-mile hike back to the truck every body was sore me included but a good time was had by all."
Billy emailed me later and said that Lucy was okay after a bit then he sent me the other installment

"My buddy Dave had told me that he wanted to go some time when I went out to run my dogs. Since the week before the dogs had treed the little bear and it was good exercise for the dogs and me both I thought we would try him again.
Well from where I parked the truck I took the same trail as I did the week before but this time I kept Steel on the lead and let Lucy and Boozer run loose. By the time I had gotten to the top of the ridge and caught my breath good. Boozer set down treed in the exact same place where they treed the little bear the week before. I packed steel in to him and in a minute or two he was right there at the tree with Lucy and boozer. I told Dave we should stay and listen for a minute to see if the bear would jump out or if he would stay treed. After a minute or two they were still hammering on him so we decided to go on to the dogs to see what they had.
They were about a quarter of a mile from us up on the side of a steep laurel thicket ridge. They weren't thirty yards from where they were treed the last time. I told Dave that we should slip in quite lest we should spook the bear and make him bail out.
When we had gotten about thirty yards from them I finally got to where I could see the dogs. Real soon I noticed that they weren't treeing but that they had something bayed on the ground and that seemed odd.
With all the leaves on the trees it gets a little hard to see so I crawled in to get a better look. What I saw looked to me like a big tree stump when the wind blows a tree over and the roots and all get pulled up out of the ground. I thought that they were baying something behind that. I just set there a minute to see before I went any closer and Dave tried to get to where he could see the action. We must have been twenty yards or so and when the whole stump jumped up the hill towards Boozer. Man I liked to have messed up a perfectly good pair of under wear. The bear turned and looked me straight in the eyes like he was fixen to come and greet Dave and me. About that time Steel hit him from the side and caught him by the ear. The bear comensed to slinging my seventy-pound dog through the air like a dishrag. Given the opportunity I came backing out of the thicket with out wasting any time.
Steel was thrown down and came rolling down the hill and I saw right away that he was hurt. I ran up and grabbed him and pulled him on down into an old logging road and laid him down to look him over. Lucy and Boozer were still baying and I knew that they were about to get killed themselves. I just stood up and yelled at the bear and thought it might scare him off and but that didn't work so I yelled at Lucy to come back to me. She is the only dog that I have that I can call off of something and this time it saved her life I'm sure. The whole time the bear never moved more than ten or fifteen feet and didn't seem to be in the least concerned with me or the dogs.
Dave caught Lucy and tied her to a tree with a lead while I worked on Steels leg I cut me a stick and split it in half to make a splint for his leg cause I knew that any movement might damage it even more. He was hurting awful bad and I had to get Dave to hold him down while I worked on him. I worked on getting the splint tied on and I noticed that he had a lower tooth hanging out so I used Dave's pocketknife to cut it on out (poor dog). The whole time Boozer was still baying the bear some forty yards up the ridge.
I got Steel up and on my back and headed back out of the woods. Dave asked what I thought we should do about Boozer I laughed and told him that Boozer was on his own.
The hike out was a little over a Quarter of a mile and took about thirty minutes to get back to the truck, with two or three rest bits along the way. When a fellow carries a seventy-pound dog out of the woods he begins to appreciate a fifty-pound dog.

When I got to the truck we could still hear Boozer baying and he hadn't moved any. I knew that since he wasn't dead yet he had a good chance and there wasn't much that I could do for him anyway.
I had a hurt dog and I knew I had to get him out to the vet so we headed out of the mountains. It took about a forty-five minute's drive to get him to the vet's Office.
I ended up leaving him over night and the vet told me that he thought Steel's leg would mend up well in six to eight weeks.
So we headed back to find Boozer and luckily he was waiting for us where we had come out at earlier.

I have been bear hunting for about twelve years now and it was the biggest bear that I have ever seen in the woods. When Steel was stuck to him he made Steel look like a jack Russell. If I had to guess the weight I would say that the bear would have went five or six hundred pounds.
Later that day I noticed that Lucy had a big knot on her hip about the size of a soft ball where she had gotten bitten. I looked her over real good since I didn't think to earlier but the one injury was all she seemed to have so I put her on antibiotics and just kept an eye on her.
This is the first time that I have ever had a dog to get a broken leg. And even though the vet said that it would take six to eight weeks for the bone to heal I will give him a much longer rest.

Even though my best dog is down I still have a few that are coming along. Right now I have high hopes for my Sally bell pup.
Any way hog hunting is about to start up for me so I will try to send you a few stories about these dogs from time to time. "
Thanks a lot Billy for sharing that and I hope Steel mends quickly. Any of you folks that are looking for a stud dog I would run not walk to use Steel before he runs out of luck. He's definitely the real deal and Rich Dwyer recently emailed me this
"That Steel dog of Billy's is just the ticket. I would love an inbred pup out of him and I would like to talk Billy into such a breeding and roll the dice and try and stamp some of his traits into a litter. I do not think anybody can put into words to the type of dog he is but one would be hard pressed to find a better dog than Steel.
Can you tell that he has more than impressed me?"
Well I've never laid eyes on Steel personally but I'm impressed as well and if I can ever talk Billy into coming up here to see some real mountains maybe I can talk him into bringing a pup along as well. Rich has a young dog out of Steel that he says is coming along great and is a looker to boot.
I do know that Billy currently has pups out of Slim bred to a daughter of Molly/Grit, Molly being a (Steel/Lucy) offspring and he may have a litter of pups due around second week of July out of Molly (Steel/Lucy) x Mo (Slim/Alley Cat). Mo is a red line dog only about a year and a half old.

While I haven't had quite the excitement that Billy has my first bear of the season was interesting for a different reason. I had headed out at 3:00 pm for an evening of bear hunting and had gone up a road as far as possible before the snow turned me back. There was no sign and still a couple feet of snow in the bush so I thought I would let the dogs out for a run back down the road. They hadn't gone half a klick when they took off up the mountain. Like a fool I hadn't put the tracking collars on so I thought would head down the road a bit to see if I could hear them. I shut the truck off and listened but there was no sound and the creeks were making too much noise. It was about 5:30 by this time so I jumped back in the truck to go back up and start walking in but when I turned the key nothing. I looked under the hood for a loose wire but these newer trucks are getting pretty user unfriendly and after trying unsuccessfully to pry my truck which is an automatic out of a pullout so I could coast down I was getting ready for a 20 kilometer walk once the dogs decided to come back. I had jumped the solenoid on the firewall with no success but finally clued in to jumping the solenoid on the starter with my leatherman which did the trick. Problem was it was getting late and I didn't know what the problem was so I was afraid to turn the truck off. In the end I sat there a long while then drove up and down with the dogs finally coming to the horn at 11:30 after I am sure treeing the bear for a good while. We chased the same bear the next day but he lost the dogs across a creek.
The next weekend I again let the dogs out to road them a bit, again without collars and this time they tore off and treed a bear within 500 meters of where I let them out. I may be stupid or likely just a slow learner but I think the dogs will wear collars religiously from now on, bear sign or not.
For the July 2001 column I wrote about a bear I treed while out with the wife and kids. He was a nice size cinnamon bear and I would have taken him but I didn't have my bow so he went to run again. I believe I chased him twice more that summer without a tree. Last week I was in pretty much the same spot and I spotted what I am sure is the same bear. I turned out the dogs and down the hill they went. I hung tight hoping to hear the dogs tree but all I heard was the occasional bawl from Buzz my hound who is pretty much close mouthed on trail, it sounded like they were coming round but I wasn't sure. Then a few minutes later the bear popped up on the road and trotted towards me not 50 meters away. Upon seeing me he left his easy lope and burned up the hill with the dogs following a while later. The long and the short of it was he took the exact same route as when I chased him last spring losing the dogs at a creek crossing. Last year I had to get Bar who was just over a year old from across the creek, this year it was Grizz my one year old dog. Last year the bear circled and crossed right in front of my wife and kids, this year he circled and crossed right in front of me. He's definitely got a system and I think I may need more dog power to put this guy up a tree again although the season is not over yet. On the way home the dogs did manage to tree a medium sized black bear.
Currently I am lodging with the dogs as I took our youngest daughter out to hopefully tree a bear. We did see a very young bear that just popped up as we drove by so she was excited but when I put the dogs on a strike where I knew there was a bigger bear they left the country and probably treed but too far and steep for an eight year old girl to follow so we had to wait for them to come back which they did at midnight. I guess "I don't know when we'll be home" has a different meaning to me then to my wife. Still I guess it's a mothers right to worry I just hate being in the line of fire. It's all good though as she is very understanding about letting me get out about as much as I care to.
As usual I've put the dogs on lots more bear then they've treed but I know they've treed a number that I just haven't been able to get to. At this time of year it is just about impossible to hear dogs treeing from much distance due the fact that all the creeks are swollen with runoff and making an awful lot of noise. I've got a Wildlife Materials tracker but have to confess I just am not that good with it. I don't know if it is signal bounce in these tight valleys or just me, but pinpointing the dogs is just about beyond me. In the end I usually just drive with the mini antennae attached but not deployed and look for the strongest signal. Trying to actually locate with the mini is for me a lost cause. I do use the large three element antennae but like I said with limited success. If anyone has really got locating dogs in heavy timber in steep country down or can offer some suggestions drop me a line or email.
Well that's about it. I didn't get too much this month so that's all the Airedale news that's fit to print this time around. Keep those stories coming our way and we will do our best to get them in.

The quote of the month is "I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money." - Pablo Picasso

As Henry always said: "Until next month, let me hear from you Airedale people and don't forget to put your arms around those black and tan dogs with the beards and the moustaches and talk to them. They are people dogs and family members.
Respectfully submitted, Clint Stubbe, Northern Corresponding Secretary for the
Working Airedale Terrier Association. No rules, regulations, officers, dues
or formal affiliations. It's more a state of mind.