00:00:05 Speaker 1: 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. 00:00:21 Speaker 2: And you were catching so many lines you could leave the motor running when I was riding down the road going down the hill. 00:00:27 Speaker 3: YE made it. 00:00:28 Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, I was really getting riched. 00:00:32 Speaker 2: 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, 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 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 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 California was the place to be if you wanted to hunt big game with hounds. 00:02:13 Speaker 3: This place is gorgeous. This isn't what I expected. 00:02:19 Speaker 4: From this property. 00:02:21 Speaker 1: I caught lions and bears all over everything. 00:02:25 Speaker 4: All of the stuff that you can see. 00:02:28 Speaker 2: 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. 00:02:40 Speaker 1: 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. 00:02:57 Speaker 4: Right here at this house. 00:03:00 Speaker 2: 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. 00:03:24 Speaker 3: The hills flow with the smooth. 00:03:26 Speaker 2: 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 ridge that dominates the landscape. 00:03:53 Speaker 1: 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 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. 00:04:24 Speaker 2: 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. 00:04:39 Speaker 1: 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. 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. 00:05:11 Speaker 3: Yeah, I see over there as. 00:05:13 Speaker 1: Far as you can see, and he's just about to go over. 00:05:17 Speaker 4: And I thought, if he goes over. 00:05:18 Speaker 2: That so there's a big valley in between that. 00:05:21 Speaker 1: It's called bull Run Basin. The other side is called bull Run Basin. 00:05:25 Speaker 2: 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. 00:05:47 Speaker 1: 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. 00:06:09 Speaker 2: 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. 00:06:21 Speaker 1: 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 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. 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. 00:07:17 Speaker 4: Is that We got a walk. 00:07:21 Speaker 2: 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. 00:07:32 Speaker 1: 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. 00:07:52 Speaker 4: This is bear Trot Fridge right to our. 00:07:54 Speaker 2: 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. 00:08:08 Speaker 1: Yes, because where the bear was started was at the five thousand foot elevation and Portuguese passes seven thousand. 00:08:14 Speaker 4: Wow, So they almost got He almost had to. 00:08:17 Speaker 3: You had to go. 00:08:18 Speaker 2: You had to lose elevation and gain it. 00:08:20 Speaker 1: And many times yes, yes, back and forth, back and forth. 00:08:24 Speaker 2: 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 every breath, but this bear just won't tree. He knew this bear, and he knew that it wouldn't trill. 00:08:55 Speaker 1: 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. 00:09:08 Speaker 3: This far with the dogs behind him. 00:09:09 Speaker 4: 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. 00:09:18 Speaker 1: You don't a dog didn't dare taking and put his mouth on that bear. 00:09:23 Speaker 2: They knew with his three or four dogs swarming, the bear edge shoots as it spins, but misses the mark. 00:09:31 Speaker 4: And he took off. 00:09:32 Speaker 1: 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. 00:09:48 Speaker 4: Wow. 00:09:49 Speaker 1: 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. 00:09:57 Speaker 2: That's an incredible feed for the has been an incredible feat for a man. 00:10:02 Speaker 4: Man. 00:10:03 Speaker 2: How far do you think you went? 00:10:05 Speaker 3: I mean really in miles? 00:10:07 Speaker 1: Actually, Yeah, there was a dirt trail and I was walking it twenty five twenty five miles, I think. 00:10:15 Speaker 2: 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. 00:10:35 Speaker 3: Several months ago. 00:10:37 Speaker 2: 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. 00:10:45 Speaker 3: Ed, I really do a lot of people. A lot of people write books, and I read a lot of books. 00:10:50 Speaker 2: 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. 00:11:05 Speaker 3: And so anyway, thank you for host you welcome. 00:11:08 Speaker 4: We're sure you're happy to have you here. 00:11:09 Speaker 2: But it's an incredible and beautiful place. 00:11:13 Speaker 1: 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. 00:11:31 Speaker 2: 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. 00:11:47 Speaker 4: I mean we're here more than that. 00:11:48 Speaker 3: More than that, we're in your wilderness. 00:11:51 Speaker 4: Really, you're forty miles away from the gas station. 00:11:58 Speaker 2: 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. 00:12:15 Speaker 4: You know, I always as a kid. 00:12:18 Speaker 1: 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 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 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 in the Oki Finok Swamp in Georgia, and uh, it really caught my interests. I mean it really did. 00:13:29 Speaker 2: And the next were down there, they're hunting hunting coons, hunting coons, yeah, yep. 00:13:34 Speaker 1: 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 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. 00:14:04 Speaker 4: And what was your intention? 00:14:06 Speaker 3: Was your intention to run lion or bear? 00:14:09 Speaker 1: I just wanted I like dogs, and I liked the idea of hunting and a honeywood dogs sounding it could. 00:14:14 Speaker 3: So you would have been in your early twenties probably at this. 00:14:17 Speaker 4: Time I was. I was. 00:14:19 Speaker 3: I just wanted some hunting dogs. 00:14:20 Speaker 1: 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. 00:14:36 Speaker 2: 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 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. 00:15:10 Speaker 1: 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 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 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, 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. 00:16:27 Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 00:19:15 Speaker 3: And was devastated. 00:19:17 Speaker 2: So he again was back in the business of looking for yet another dog. It was now nineteen sixty four. 00:19:27 Speaker 1: 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 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 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. 00:20:28 Speaker 4: Which we called Bo. 00:20:29 Speaker 1: 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 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 de count out of the Elbert Vaughan stock of English hounds, which eventually to be canting the Elber Blue tich. 00:21:22 Speaker 2: 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 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. 00:22:02 Speaker 1: 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. 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 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. 00:23:00 Speaker 3: They'd treat these foxes and these little oak trees. 00:23:02 Speaker 4: They do tree here there. 00:23:03 Speaker 1: It's called a grave cross fox. They're a lot harder to tree than the bobcats are. 00:23:09 Speaker 2: 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 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. 00:23:53 Speaker 1: 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. 00:24:12 Speaker 3: Years, been. 00:24:14 Speaker 1: 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, 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. 00:24:49 Speaker 2: 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. 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. 00:25:26 Speaker 1: 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 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. 00:25:55 Speaker 2: And this was obviously a time when was a little more favorable to hunt lions California. 00:26:00 Speaker 4: Yes, it was so. 00:26:02 Speaker 1: 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 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. 00:26:45 Speaker 4: 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. 00:26:52 Speaker 2: Was that common back then or is that just something that you wanted to. 00:26:55 Speaker 1: 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. 00:27:15 Speaker 3: So that's business. 00:27:17 Speaker 4: The pressure was on, you know. 00:27:19 Speaker 3: Made for some good outfitters, didn't it. 00:27:21 Speaker 1: It separated them, It truly did. Yeah, I caught them a lion on the on the third day. 00:27:30 Speaker 2: 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. 00:27:38 Speaker 1: 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 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. 00:28:12 Speaker 4: So anyways, we ended. 00:28:13 Speaker 1: 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 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. 00:28:45 Speaker 2: 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. 00:28:52 Speaker 3: Ye made it? 00:28:53 Speaker 1: 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 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. 00:29:34 Speaker 4: I was so poor. It took every penny. 00:29:37 Speaker 1: 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. 00:29:52 Speaker 4: Miles later it was pretty rough shape. 00:29:54 Speaker 1: 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 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, 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 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. 00:31:15 Speaker 2: 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 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 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. 00:32:16 Speaker 3: I wanted to ask ed about horses. 00:32:20 Speaker 2: 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. 00:32:33 Speaker 4: I did enjoy that. 00:32:35 Speaker 1: 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 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. 00:33:06 Speaker 4: When I caught it. Yeah, I mean I could catch it. 00:33:08 Speaker 1: 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 with the lion, I just got to I just got to pay the bill all by myself. 00:33:32 Speaker 3: You know, did that happen very often? Or did you catch most most people lines? 00:33:36 Speaker 1: 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 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, 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, how many did I catch as compared to driving roads? I caught more driving roads just because you can travel. 00:34:51 Speaker 2: Fast, just it's an efficient way to hunt. 00:34:54 Speaker 4: It is you can travel much faster. 00:34:55 Speaker 3: You're looking for an actual track, yes, dirt track in the road. 00:34:59 Speaker 4: That's right. 00:35:00 Speaker 1: 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. 00:35:16 Speaker 4: You could just about say, if this lion. 00:35:19 Speaker 1: Has gone that far whatever that is, a mile or whatever it is, the chances are he went right through there, and. 00:35:26 Speaker 4: You almost look, yes, you almost always right. 00:35:30 Speaker 1: 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 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 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. 00:36:34 Speaker 4: You know. 00:36:35 Speaker 1: 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. 00:36:51 Speaker 2: 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. 00:37:11 Speaker 3: That's a good thing. And back to horse hunting. 00:37:15 Speaker 2: 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. 00:37:23 Speaker 3: I've been watting one of those ever since I saw his What was your favorite to chase with your hounds? 00:37:30 Speaker 4: I love chasing bears. 00:37:31 Speaker 3: Did you more than lions? 00:37:33 Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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. 00:38:48 Speaker 3: You, So that was the easy one. 00:38:50 Speaker 4: Those Areasi's pop ups. 00:38:51 Speaker 1: 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, you're looking at it, there is a tree. 00:39:16 Speaker 2: 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? 00:39:29 Speaker 4: Ed No. 00:39:30 Speaker 1: 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. 00:39:46 Speaker 4: Apparently mine did. 00:39:47 Speaker 1: 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 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 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. 00:40:51 Speaker 4: Then you go all the way to the bottom. 00:40:53 Speaker 1: 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. 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, 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 have no less them three and usually about four. 00:42:02 Speaker 4: I'd rotate the dog. 00:42:03 Speaker 3: You could catch dogs. You can catch bears with three, four or five hounds. 00:42:07 Speaker 1: 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, 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, if you have three or four dogs that can't catch a bear, you don't need more, you need new ones. 00:42:59 Speaker 4: Yeah, on that to be true. 00:43:03 Speaker 2: 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. 00:43:23 Speaker 1: 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 burned myself out. 00:43:46 Speaker 2: How long did you? Just to give an overview? So you started, you started guiding in what year and ended in what year? 00:43:55 Speaker 4: Okay? 00:43:55 Speaker 1: I started guiding in nineteen sixty six and in nineteen late nineteen seventies I quit guiding. I didn't quit hunting, I quit guiding. 00:44:09 Speaker 2: 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 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 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. 00:45:11 Speaker 3: I really thank ed for this. 00:45:13 Speaker 2: 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. 00:45:31 Speaker 3: As hunters and conservationists. 00:45:35 Speaker 2: 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.