The Hunt Can Be Too Much to Bear : The chase: Treeing of animals with hounds is defended as best way to ensure a clean kill.

“He ain’t in here,” Sonny Rose yelled from inside the cave.

“He’s gotta be in there,” Danny Posey responded from a ledge above the entrance.

“He ain’t in there,” Rose insisted, backing out on his hands and knees--then: “Oh . . . !”

Rose got out of the cave and onto his feet beside the entrance an instant before the bear emerged. The bear looked at him, an arm’s length away. Rose leveled his .44 magnum.

The hunting of black bears was not allowed in California last year after the Department of Fish and Game lost a challenge by animal rights groups in Sacramento Superior Court. This year bow hunting was disallowed, but hunting with firearms was reinstated when the DFG produced an environmental document acceptable to the same judge, Cecily Bond.

A year of living less dangerously apparently was a temporary boon to the bears.

“We’re overrun with bears right now,” says Mike Wingo, president of the Modesto Houndsmen.

Bears are hunted most successfully with dogs, which are trained to pursue a scent until they chase a bear into a tree or are otherwise able to hold it at bay until the hunter catches up.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Although the Fish and Game Commission set a limit of 15,000 permits this year, as of last weekend only 8,017 have been sold for the hunt running from Oct. 13 to Dec. 30. The hunt will be stopped if a quota of 1,250 bears is killed, but only 336 tags have been validated.

It seems the bear population can stand a limited hunt--the DFG estimates there are 15,000 to 18,000--but animal rights groups object to the method. They say shooting a bear out of a tree is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Hunters say such a method ensures a clean kill, rather than a wounded animal that gets away only to die slowly, and allows hunters to be more selective by studying the quarry close-up. They also say they don’t shoot every bear they tree.

“I don’t say we don’t kill bear,” said Wingo, who has a hide on one wall of his den to prove it. “We do. But I don’t know the last time I used a bear tag. The chase is more exciting than the kill. It’s seeing the dogs start a cold track and trail it and jump it.”

Without dogs?

“It’s just sheer luck,” Wingo said.

The best alternative is to put out bait--legal in some states, such as Oregon, but illegal in California, which has some of the tightest bear-hunting restrictions in the country.

“To me, that’s no sport at all,” Wingo said. “You throw a dead cow down or rotten meat and get up in a tree stand right above the bait. A bear comes into bait and you just shoot him. That’s no sport.”

The DFG says 70% of the successful hunters use dogs. The others must work long and hard. Even with dogs, the success rate is less than 10%.

“Just because a person has a hound doesn’t mean he can tree a bear,” Wingo said.

Wingo uses a breed called treeing walkers, smaller but quicker than blue tick hounds, which some hunters prefer.

“They go back a long way as being bear dogs,” Wingo said. “They start young.”

A bear hunt isn’t always one-sided. One of Wingo’s best dogs was Nell, “before I got her killed on a bear hunt three years ago. I know several hunters have gotten dogs killed this year already.”

Now Wingo uses Nell’s daughters, Frosty and Tiny. He has turned down an offer of $5,000 for the pair.

“They’re not for sale at any price,” he said. “If it’s a good bloodline like my pack of dogs, (hunting is) natural. But you’ve got to put him with an old trained dog to show him what to do, then break him of running trash--coyotes, skunks, possums.”

Some dogs want no part of bears.

“They’re just scared to death of bear scent,” Wingo said. “They’ll run the other way. A good dog just doesn’t run to a bear and bite him and make him climb a tree. They work the bear like a cow dog will work a cow. They nip at his heels and pester him.”

A recent Audubon Society documentary showed Southern hunters “training” dogs by turning them loose on a small bear chained to a tree.

“My father lives in Georgia,” Wingo said with a sigh. “I guess, occasionally, they still do that. I doubt if it’s done at all out here. I did see it in the Great Smoky Mountains. To me, that is stupid, because a greedy dog is not going to live long on a bear. A dog is no match for a bear.”

Wingo’s dogs wear radio tracking collars, linked to a receiver on the seat of his pickup truck. The collars emit beeps distinctive to each dog.

“Before Nell got killed, it wasn’t nothing for my dogs to stay treed on a bear two or three days,” Wingo said. “A lot of times they’re so far in a canyon you can’t get to them. A bear race is hard and fast. A bear’s going to go to the roughest part of the mountains he can find. This is why we use tracking collars . . . to retrieve the dogs. Before we had tracking collars, you spent more time looking for your dogs than you did hunting.”

Wingo, 38, has been active in pursuing hunters’ interests. He deals with Fish and Game commissioners and managers on a first-name basis and, despite the recent court victory, remains concerned about the future of hunting.

The small frame house he shares with his wife, Tracy, and young daughter is decorated with mounted animals and trophies for the largest bear (356 pounds), fox (10 pounds 12 ounces) and bobcat (18-8) taken by a member of the California Houndsmen this year. There also is a mounted raccoon that weighed 22-12, but Wingo said, “I didn’t get ‘coon of the year.

“The way things are going, I’d better have one stuffed of every animal so I can look back and say, ‘We used to hunt this.’ I’ve been going hunting since I was 4 or 5, when my dad would have to pack me on his back. We are pro-hunting, but we do not want to see the species wiped out. We believe we should be able to harvest excess numbers of any species. If we wipe it out, we’ll never hunt it again.”

So he looks forward to the next hunt.

“We will tree a bear tomorrow,” he promises.

Wingo is diabetic and hobbled by a broken kneecap he suffered in June, so his hunting is restricted to driving until his dogs sniff out a scent.

Rose and Posey are Merced contractors. At 5 a.m., they are shivering in 35-degree temperatures on a back road illuminated by a full harvest moon. Wingo’s dogs, tethered to a platform behind the cab of his pickup, are yelping to go.

Wingo turns them loose--Frosty, Tiny and Star, a youngster--and the hunters wait, listening as the howling fades off.

Soon Wingo detects a change in the howls and says: “They’ve got him on the ground . . . he’s fighting them on the ground. This bear may not climb a tree.”

As it develops, after the hunters have spent half an hour climbing the mountain, sometimes through manzanita and buckrush so thick they have to crawl on their bellies in mud and leaves dampened by rain two days earlier, there is no bear--only a strong scent from where a bear spent the night.

The hunters, scratched and filthy, bring the dogs back down and drive some more. There is another strong scent but another dead end. It is shortly after noon when the dogs get on a live one. After another difficult climb, the hunters find a 225-pound sow treed high in a tall pine. Apparently she has no cubs, making her legal game. But as they approach, the bear, defying the dogs, climbs back down and heads farther up the hill.

Posey shoots once with his .30-30 but, it is determined later, only wings the bear through the hide on top of its back. The dogs chase her into a small cave, and the hunt becomes a standoff.

Tiny’s head still shows fresh teeth marks from two weeks earlier when another bear, also cornered in a cave, almost bit her head off. But she keeps darting into the cave, baying at the bear. That goes on for half an hour until one of the group, Mark Anderson, gets an idea: Drop some burning brush through a small hole in the top of the cave.

“They hate fire,” Rose agrees. “Light a fire, he’ll come out.”

“I read about it in a Louis L’Amour (novel),” Anderson says.

For a long time it doesn’t seem to be working, so Rose ventures in, preceded by his cocked .44 magnum.

He fails to see the bear because she has backed into a crevice--but seeing Rose, she comes right out. Some hunters prefer handguns for close-quarters hunting. Rose might not have gotten a rifle around in time.

As the bear turns toward him, Rose fires one shot through her skull above the right eye. A split-second later Posey fires through her neck from above.