by Kevin Reyes
I started off my guiding life as a hired hand on bear hunts in southern New Mexico. I cooked, I cleaned, and I was the guy who "ran with the dogs." I chased hounds up and down the steep slopes of the West Side Road between High Rolls and Cloud Croft. It was tough and physically demanding, but it was something I think I would have done for free. I was getting paid to hunt and you can’t beat that, at 19-years old.
The first morning we went out, we got onto the track of a bear. The dogs were singing and hot on his trail. We stopped the truck, to better hear the dogs. It sounded like they had the bear treed. The outfitter looked at me and said, "Get in there! And when you get to the tree, grab the biggest stick you can find and keep that bear in the tree until I can get our hunter there.”
Our hunter was a 75-five-year-old man who had been saving for 15 years to go on a bear hunt—with dogs. In his younger days he ran hounds in the hills of Tennessee, chasing coons. His life-long goal was to take a bear behind hounds, so I knew that I had to keep this bear in the tree.
I had no idea what to expect when I reached the tree. I headed down a canyon and could hear that I was getting closer to the dogs, but they were still moving. The bear wasn’t treed, and the dogs were fighting him. I stopped on a logging road to listen. The roar of the dogs was getting closer. I stood there not knowing what to do. I reported back on the radio. As I waited for a response, the bear suddenly came up onto the road I was on, stopped, stood up, and looked back towards the dogs. He never looked my way, but I thought for sure this was the biggest bear in New Mexico, though it was actually the first bear I had ever seen in my life.
I remember it like it was yesterday. Standing there on his back legs, he seemed to be 20-feet tall. Then, just as suddenly as he had appeared, he turned away and ran off. Not 10 seconds later old Turk came screaming by followed by the rest of the hounds. The bear dropped off in the canyon below and made a figure eight. The younger dogs, which were slower on the trail, bumped into him and turned him back into the older dogs. In less than a minute the bear was treed.
I got to the tree and saw the bear about 10 feet up the trunk. I grabbed the biggest stick I could find, and then thought to myself, “What the heck are you doing?” Poking a bear in the bottom to keep him in the tree didn’t seem like the thing to do.
But, the bear was panting and out of breath. He was excreting urine and feces, and the dogs got the worst of it. Our hunter soon arrived at the tree and fulfilled his life-long dream.
The End