THE OUTDOORS : BEAR COUNTRY : For a Young Hunter Like Dennis Purcell, Red Lodge Is Heaven

Rich Furber, a Montana game warden, spent a long day in the woods recently from 4:30 in the morning until 10 at night, hunting bear--a small one, about 8 to 12 weeks old.

A careless hunter had shot the cub’s mother. It’s against the rules to shoot a bear with cubs, and this one was still in the nursing stage. Furber figured the cub could make it for four days on its own, unless a male bear, or boar, got it first. They eat their young.

“With these little cubs, when trouble comes he goes up a tree, bawling up a storm,” Furber said.

So Furber roamed the woods, listening.

“We sure hope we round him up,” he said.

Furber even set a “live” trap, but the cub was never found.

Dennis Purcell also hunts bear, perhaps better than anyone in the state. Though only 24, he says he has killed seven himself and accompanied other hunters on “20 or 22” other kills.

Does that make Purcell and Furber philosophical enemies? Not necessarily.

One day last week Purcell was at home showing a reporter and photographer his game photo album when he flipped a page to a female black bear, or sow.

“This one had a cub with her,” said Purcell in an apologetic tone. “I’d watched her for an hour and shot her from 50 yards. Then I saw something moving in the bushes.”

Until then, Purcell hadn’t seen the cub.

“I brought it down to Rich,” Purcell said. “We thought we could rehabilitate it.”

Instead, Purcell said, Furber “took my bear and fined me 50 bucks.”

But Purcell felt worse about orphaning the cub than he did losing the $50 and his bear. He and Furber share a common interest in preserving the American black bear ( Evarctos americanus ), the most numerous species in the continental United States. Yogi is a black bear, and so is Smokey, even though they may be brown.

Around Red Lodge, a clean community of about 2,000 in south-central Montana northeast of Yellowstone National Park, the incident fueled little more than idle conversation. If any sympathy was expressed, it was for Purcell and the cub, not the late mother bear.

Conservation takes a pragmatic approach in Red Lodge, where hunting is a way of life.

“You don’t hear much at all about it,” Purcell said.

But if too many bears die, there will be no more hunting, and when they become too numerous they’re a problem. A proper level of population must be maintained.

Furber: “Ten years ago the black bear was really a pest. Now there’s a group of hunters that enjoy chasing the big bruin.”

Maybe some are locals who got tired of having their garbage cans upset when the bears, rather than forage in the woods, would wander into town for food.

“Every few years you hear about it,” Purcell said. “Some woman about five miles down the road used to raise sheep, and there were a few years they got into the sheep. Several people down the creek (had problems).

“There’s a red boxcar here that’s an ice cream place. They have bear traps set around it. Most of ‘em are smaller bears, young bears, 2 and 3 years old, kicked off the mother and all they know is to go dig in garbage cans.”

A bear, it seems, can’t always be shooed away.

“You never know,” Purcell said. “A bear’s unpredictable.”

Apparently, that’s what started attracting large numbers of hunters to the area a few years ago.

Purcell said: “When I first started huntin’ me and a couple of my buddies were the only ones out there. We had it all to ourselves. The (others) used to all hunt up the canyon along the mountain range about 30 miles. I think they heard about us killing the bears. I knew they’d have to do somethin’. “

Hunters took 96 bears in the state in 1985.

Charles Eustace of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks said: “We estimated that was 16% to 17% of the bear population. The maximum we could take and maintain the population was 10% or 11%.”

So the state instituted a quota in each of five regions. Region 5, where Red Lodge is located, had the highest quota of 8 sows or 25 total bears, limit one to a hunter, whichever came first. For the state, it was 14 or 45.

Purcell agreed it was a good idea.

“I was startin’ to see more hunters than bears,” he said.

Dennis Purcell is a mountain man, lean and loose, at one with his .30-06 rifle the way an urbanite is with his pager. He talks slowly and only when he has something to say, and then he sounds a little like Chester, the character in “Gunsmoke.”

He lives with his wife Jeannie in a small frame house across the street from the high school and does carpentry and drives a truck three days a week to make ends meet.

He also stuffs what he shoots, running a part-time taxidermy business--”Purcell’s Taxidermy, for the natural look,” the business card says--out of his mother’s house up the road near Roberts, Mont. He would like to become a full-time taxidermist. With some pride, he displays a remarkable variety of fish and game, including a bear.

“You talk about the bear huntin’, but you see elk, you see mountain goats, mountain lions, sheep, moose,” he says.

Purcell is a rarity among modern man. He is living exactly where he wants to live and doing exactly what he wants to do--and he has had choices.

“Right beside Beverly Hills someplace they’re buildin’ some big complex,” he said while wrestling his four-wheel-drive pickup up some ruts on Sheep Mountain to look for bear. “(The project is) supposed to last 15 years. They asked me if I wanted to go to it. They’re startin’ out, I think, at $17.20 an hour.

“I can’t do ‘er. I spent a winter in Vegas right after I was married. Went nuts down there. I had a job, but I didn’t like it at all. No mountains and all that heat. I’ll be damned if I’ll live somewhere I don’t like. Came home and shot that bear--the one with the cub.

“I could’ve went to work in L.A. right out of high school. It’s not for me. That’s what my brother did. He just bought himself a house, a pickup, a bike. He’s out there buyin’ all this crap and here I am shootin’ things.”

Purcell chuckles at himself, the bear hunter. Like the black bear, he goes his own way.

“Only once have I seen two big boars traveling together,” Purcell said. “But you learn where they’re at. You can see where they’ve been.”

Purcell doesn’t hunt bear by attempting to track them through the woods. Instead, he might sit atop Sheep Mountain at about 6,000 feet and use a 20x40 telescope to inspect the mile-wide valley of pine and aspen stretching over to the snowcapped Beartooth Mountain range. A creek runs through the meadow, which is sprinkled with blue and yellow wildflowers.

“Bear heaven,” Purcell says, looking out upon the lush landscape. “Until I move in.

“I’ve been running around here for 11, 12 years now. They leave their signs. You drive along and ‘scope the coolies--the ravines in the mountains. They like hangin’ around the water (with) a lot of green vegetation around ‘em. You can see the tracks where a big one walked through the creek.

“They need to eat this green grass for the digestive system. Then they go after dead animals. There was a poached moose up Red Lodge Creek Canyon this year. The (hunter) just cut the horns off and left the carcass. If you went up there you’d find (evidence of) bear all around it.

“Some guys sit by a dead cow until past dark waitin’ for ‘em. I never killed one that way. I prefer just drivin’ and ‘scopin’. Look for movement in the brush.”

Purcell needed four shots and considerable nerve to bring down his biggest bear three years ago. He had dropped the animal twice and had tracked it in brush for 2 1/2 hours when man and beast suddenly came face to face.

“I hipshot it from about 10 feet,” he said. “Put a fourth (round) in it and broke its back.”

The bear wasn’t large by some standards--6 feet long and 350 pounds--”but the size of the bear doesn’t make any difference at all,” Purcell said.

What counts for trophy purposes is the size of the head, an aggregate measurement from the tip of the nose to the back of the skull plus the width of the skull. Nineteen inches makes the state record book. Purcell’s measured 18 1/2.

But his enthusiasm for the bear hunt may be waning.

“I’m started to get bored chasin’ ‘em,” he said, “so I started messin’ around with rattlesnakes.

“I caught one yesterday and brought it home and was gonna kill it and then thought, what the hell. I took it back up on the hill. I was tryin’ to get it to strike at me to get a picture and it wouldn’t do it. You have to be quick to time it.

“I’m tryin’ to get a grizzly permit. The grizzly bears are gettin’ closer ever year, comin’ from Yellowstone over this way. You’re gettin’ a lot of outfitters around Yellowstone and a lot of hunters in the fall. I think they’re just pushin’ ‘em out.”

Most black bears can climb trees. Grizzly can’t climb, but they can run up to 35 m.p.h.

“After you!” Purcell said. “That’s the bear you watch out for.”

And the black bears must feel the same way about Purcell.