This bear led hunters and hounds on a merry chase

By Julie Harris, Bangor Daily News Staff

Ezra Dean, a guide for Grove Hill Outfitters in Brownville, had his eye on this bear for two years. The large boar kept showing up on cameras during overnight hours.

Dean has tried over the last two years to help his clients nab it. He tried to get it during trapping season, but the bear simply moved to another area. He tried to get it over bait, but the bear stopped showing up at any of the bait sites.

There was one option left. Hounds. And Pastor Mike Spencer of New York state, who was part of a group of pastors from Faith Bible College International hunting in Maine for the week, got it done.

“He was a mature, smart bear,” Dean said.

Dean’s friend Ryan DeLaBruere of DeLaBruere’s Fall Brook Kennel in Vermont, who came to Maine with his trained Plott hounds, agreed to hunt the big bear.

On Sept. 17, the bear showed up on a game camera at 4:15 a.m. Before, it had been seen between 10 p.m. and midnight, so the trail would have been cold by the time they could hunt it in the morning with dogs. But on Sept. 24, the bear made a fatal error by showing up about an hour and a half before legal hunting time, Dean said.

The dogs were taken to where the bear had been seen on camera so they could get on its scent, and be let loose to find the animal. The hounds jumped the bear near a swamp where it had laid down. They ran it through the swamp and eventually pushed it to a steep incline about a mile from where they had jumped it.

When it was obvious that the dogs had the bear cornered, the hunters moved in. They drove within 600 yards but couldn’t actually hear the dogs until they were about 300 yards away because of the steep terrain, Dean said.

The boar was on the ground with the dogs baying at it. The houndsman quickly developed a plan for leashing the six dogs, but when the hunters were about 50 yards away, the bear shot about 25 feet up a 40-foot-tall cedar tree that was as big around as a 55-gallon drum, he said.

It thrashed his way up the tree, breaking limbs as it went upward.

The bear wasn’t comfortable in the tree and the animal was so big, it made it look like it was clinging to a sapling the way the tree swayed, Dean said.

Dean got Spencer in position. The dogs were pulled away. And three shots brought the bear out of the tree onto the ground. It was Spencer’s first bear.

They didn’t want to cut it up and take it out in pieces so they brought in a Jet sled. It was 600 yards straight back to the truck, but they took an 800-yard path that went around the bog. Two hours later, the bear was out of the woods..

The bear weighed in at 484 pounds at General Store & More in Brownville, an official state game registration station.

It was Grove Hill’s biggest bear ever, and for Ryan and his dogs too.

Spencer will eat the meat, and he plans to get a full body mount of the bear through Ryan Rhodes Taxidermy.

“When we first saw the bear on the camera, I thought it would go 400 (pounds). When I saw it in the woods, I said 420. No one guessed it would be close to 500 pounds. It ate plenty of the peanuts we put out (for bait),” Dean said.

He said they will get the official age back from the state, but he guessed the bear was 10-plus years old.

Reflecting on the hunt, Dean said it was a game of chess with this bear, trying to outsmart it.

“Any harvest is great and the chase is a thrill, but having the history and trying to outsmart the animal is cool,” Dean said.