This bear had been on Ezra Dean’s wish list for two years. He is a guide for Grove Hill Outfitters in Brownville. The big pig kept showing up on cameras at night.
Dean has been trying for two years to help his clients get it. He tried to catch it during bear season, but the bear just went to a different place. Even though he used bait, the bear quit coming to any of the bait spots.
There was only one choice left. Hounds. And Pastor Mike Spencer from New York State did it. He was hunting in Maine with a group of preachers from Faith Bible College International for the week.
Dean said, “He was a grown-up, smart bear.”
DeLaBruere’s Fall Brook Kennel in Vermont, run by Dean’s friend Ryan DeLaBruere, agreed to hunt the big bear. He brought his trained Plott dogs with him to Maine.
At 4:15 a.m. on September 17, the bear was caught on a game camera. It had been seen before between 10 p.m. and midnight, so the trail would have been cold when they tried to hunt it with dogs in the morning.
Dean said that the bear made a fatal mistake that Tuesday when it showed up about an hour and a half before it was allowed to hunt.
The dogs were taken to the spot where the bear had been seen on camera so they could get a sense of it. Then they were set free to find the animal. The dogs jumped the bear near a pond where it was lying down. They pushed it to a steep hill about a mile from where they had jumped it after running it through the swamp.
The hunters moved in when it was clear that the dogs had the bear trapped. Dean said that because the ground was so steep, they drove within 600 yards but couldn’t hear the dogs until they were about 300 yards away.
When the dogs barked at the pig, it was lying on the ground. As soon as the houndsman thought of a way to tie up the six dogs, 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. The hunters were about 50 yards away.
It thrashed up the tree, breaking branches as it went.
Dean said that the bear didn’t like being in the tree and that the way the tree moved made it look like the bear was holding on to a sapling.
Dean put Spencer in place. The dogs were taken away. After being shot three times, the bear got down from the tree. Spencer’s first bear.
They brought in a Jet sled because they didn’t want to cut it up and take it out in pieces. The straight way back to the truck was 600 yards, but they took an 800-yard path that went around the bog. The bear was no longer in the woods after two hours.
At the state-approved brownville store General Store & More, the bear weighed in at 484 pounds.
Ridge Hill had never seen a bear that big before. Ryan and his dogs thought so too.
Spencer is going to get a full-body mount of the bear from Ryan Rhodes Taxidermy and eat the meat.
“When we saw the bear on camera for the first time, I thought it would weigh 400 pounds.” I said 420 when I saw it in the woods. No one thought it would be close to 500 pounds. Dean said, “It ate a lot of the peanuts we put out as bait.”
Until they hear back from the state, he said they thought the bear was at least 10 years old.
Dean thought of the hunt as a game of chess with the bear, where he had to beat it.
Dean said, “Any harvest is great, and the chase is exciting, but it’s cool to know the history and try to trick the animal.”