The Baddest Bear­… Yet

William DuPont (left), the shooter who finally took the bear, and Joey Moulton after a wild hunt on Sept. 19.

At least the Global Positioning System—so now you know what GPS stands for—kens where they are.

Even from a couple hundred or so miles skyward, it keeps up, spot-on, with the race. While we, somewhere or other in the vastnesses of the Okefenokee Swamp in Clinch County, can only go from experience in attempting to figure the direction it’s headed.

Let’s see, right now we’re bordering Little Mule Block. If the bear cuts south, he’ll cross Ed Break Road, so we have to get hunters lined out there.

Quickly.

Should he decide to maintain his eastward route, he’ll whip over Dead End Davis Road and barrel into Big Mule Block. North? Washout Road, which happens to be aptly named. At the moment it features a juvenile pond reaching across it and out into the Swamp. One always wonders: just how deep is that hole? No matter; we’re bouncing and sloshing on…

Doubling back—always a possibility—he could slip over Boat Seat Road and into Leaning Pine Block. Happens to be one of my favorite places on the planet. Killed my last bear there a while back.

All these thoughts slip in uninvited over a matter of seconds; seems adrenaline has kicked my mind into overdrive. But we ain’t seen nothing yet.

The CB spits, and a thundering voice of one of our oldest hands bellows, “He’s running through 2 feet of water and his back’s 3 feet out of it. Somebody better get in here and kill this big…”

Since I can’t personally monitor parental guidance over the reading of this page, a dozen or so words were edited from that brief, voltage-crackling statement. Use your imagination. And should you be thinking that if he’s looking at him, then he should be shooting, remind yourself of where we are. Which is in water up to and occasionally over your armpits, behind a bear that is running for a while, stopping to fight dogs for a while, then resuming roaming. And did I mention a billion trees and trillion thorn-studded vines and limbs? It is a fact of life that until you’ve been in here, hundreds of yards from any of the dirt paths we call roads,  you can’t wrap your head around what this place is like.

It’s not for the masses; but the Oke has made its way into my bloodstream worse than malaria.

Meanwhile, back at the pickup…

The dash-mounted screen shows the dogs’ trail. When a bear track is found and the decision made to turn out just a few at first, each hound—and there are manifold breeds—is fitted with a transmitter collar. Punch in its individual collar number from a hand-held device, and it shows up on the GPS screen. Thus, you know which dog you’re looking at and its position.

Roughly.

Comrade-in-arms Don Butts and I have studied the dogs—packed in close now, so they’re face to face with him—for a while, as we attempted to lay groundwork for an ambush. Apace, we whisk our way ahead to set up bordering the road. I grab the ought six, then thumb without even thinking to be sure the holster strap has the Dan Wesson .357 magnum snapped snugly in place on my right hip. Vines and limbs have developed an unsavory tactic of ripping and tearing things loose. Ol’ Dan is about the last guy I want to be without right now, just in case things get dicey; we’ve already figured that there’s nothing routine about this race, and that we have a particularly peeved bear on our hands.

The frenzied yowls are clearly audible now, out front and off to our left. They could pop out at any second. A final glimpse at the screen before hitting the dirt, and I see that all the numbers appear to be in each other’s laps and accounted for.

Except, that is, for one…

Even writing this my blood pressure is spiking, simply from remembering. Let’s take a break and lay a little groundwork.

One swat from a bear paw is enough to kill a dog, which is exactly what happened with this bear while on a dog hunt in Clinch County.

It starts, if one can say it starts anywhere at all, in the summer. Bear hunting with dogs in the Okefenokee Swamp is far from a random exercise. One only gets four, three-day September and October weekends of season at present, and I can well remember when it was far fewer. So preparation is much the same as in locating that big buck: feeders and cameras to scope out the range of a shootable trophy.

Here’s the deal: it’s legal and legit to RUN bears with dogs in the months leading up to the season but not to actually shoot. Some hunters have upward of 40 dogs; they’re not going to feed them year-round for 12 hunting days. Train the dogs, tree the bear, wave hello/goodbye—which is pretty much what I prefer to do even during the season, unless we’re on a monster—catch up the dogs, rinse, repeat.

(Go back to camp, hang sopping, muddy clothes and boots out to dry, break out the peroxide and antibiotic cream for a dozen or two scratches and cuts, fire up the grill and lie about how much fun we all had…)

You are allowed to put out bait stations to draw a bear into an area, but that must be gone before the season rolls around.

Like a bear is going to put down roots in one spot anyway.

So when opening day—which I look at pretty much as I did Christmas morn at age five—finally rolls around, at least you have a semblance of an idea where a shooter bear might actually be unless he changed his mind an hour before daylight and decided to vacation in Florida. (Which, by the way, has no open season. Exactly why that is happens to be above my pay grade, but I neither have to agree with nor like it. But I digress…)

The folks I hunt with, either on the East or West side of the Swamp, aim high. You may legally be able to shoot a sub-100-lb. bear, but you’re going to get a lot of sideways glances and the possibility of a butt-kicking if it happens. There are exceptions to every rule—which we’ll see in a bit—but a treed bear is off limits to me. Just a personal thing, and I’ll never criticize anyone for taking that shot; all a part of the hunt, because it very likely may be the only opportunity you’ll ever get.

We always prefer boars over sows, but then bears being hounded on the ground are hard to convince to pause, hike a leg, and give a would-be shooter a peek. If it’s big enough and running or fighting, I’m blasting.

Since 1989, I’ve spent opening days at a hundred degrees, swarming mosquitos, yawning boredom and never a sign from daylight to quitting time. I’ve also had one during which we had three bears running in the same block at the same time and killed two within 30 minutes of loosing the dogs, before the sun even topped the trees.

But in all my years, I’ve never seen a hunt like the one on Sept. 19, 2024…

It is nearly seven o-clock at a mist-shrouded crossing of dirt roads, chosen as a meeting spot because it’s one of the few places to fit all the hunters’ trucks, even now lined one behind the other. Of the 15 or so here to discuss safety and logistics, maybe half are all in for the business at hand. The smoke-like grayness of the dawning is reluctant to leave us, muffling the blood-suckers’ whining and dampening our hushed cathedral. There are no sounds from the outside here, no false lighting. It is as it has always been.

Several tracks have been located. As simply as it sounds, we choose the largest, then disperse to line out the roads surrounding the block that bear is in.

You’ve heard it here before: park the trucks on the inside, everybody STAY on that side, and shoot behind and away from fellow hunters as the bear crosses the road. Within 30 minutes, it happened exactly that way.

Oh, did I leave out that you’re supposed to actually HIT the bear? And that NEVER, under any freakin’ circumstances, hop into your truck and reverse whirl to the spot you THINK you MAY have put a bullet into him?

Because when the hunter to your right has a chip shot and swings onto the big, hustling boar, what he sees through his scope just above his target are YOUR BRAKE LIGHTS!

I can’t tell you how glad the whole of us was that William Dupont didn’t pull that trigger! I’ve seen an injured hunter airlifted out of here before, and never want to see it again. The first one was bitten and mauled by a “dead” bear; .44 magnum rifle wounds we don’t need. For the second time in my experience, though, somebody got cussed out so thoroughly and completely that even I was impressed. Both times came in the Swamp, where, thankfully, even screaming doesn’t carry all that far. These hunters are a breed apart, and we love each other like brothers. But then, you know how brothers can be…

The bear? Louisiana by now.

Mid-morning, the decision was made to put in on another boar that had obviously been doing his best to true-love a sow. Their pads worked up and down and back and forth on the soft sand, at times branching into the gloom before meandering back. When the dogs struck, they pushed him off her tail and trail. Maybe that’s why he was in a murderous mood in the first place. Which brings us back to that missing collar number…

Handling the hounds and watching them work is a large part of what this hunt is all about, and some dogs just stand out. As did the little Walker female, classic black-and-white coat shimmering in the sun as she hit the ground. It’s dangerous, this emptying the dog box and sending in the young ones behind the wizened. Judgement call. But some bears are just not going to be stopped unless you pack in as many hounds as necessary to make them, giving us hunters time to get to the fight. As we were to find out later, this was a 420-lb. demon fully equipped with enough weapons to take out the entire pack.

Even now that Walker lay bloating, ripped and torn, guts strewn. Bear dogs trail and fight bears. That’s what they do. I’ve seen four plott hounds, one on each leg, stretch out a live bear on the ground and convince him he’d best go back up a tree so that our one-legged shooter could make his way in. If they hadn’t been called off, they’d have killed that bear.

But he was half the size of what we’re dealing with. And now, this bear has to die. Play time is over. There’s a palpable hardness of spirit as faces grow grim and jaws set tight. No banter. Business.

The cacophony of combat has ramped up into a single shrill scream as Don and I spread out. Other hunters, including my son Dylan, have “gone in,” ranging into the Swamp from the other side.

It comes in an instant, the BOOM echoing off trees up and down, followed seconds later by its twin. I see Don hustling back to the truck to check the CB, before yelling, “He’s wounded! He’s wounded and still fighting!”

Words can’t explain it. Forget a stress test; if ever I get through this, my heart’s good to go. I can literally feel adrenaline’s amazing effects: every sense and every nerve are ramped up to their peak as the tableau unfolds in front of me, still moving.

I think of Dylan—that’s what dads do—but he’s grown now, raised to this. He knows his business; however, had I known at the time just how close things were to be…

On the road, we had no way of knowing that a .308 round from William, down in the Swamp with Dylan and two or three others, had punched into each of the bear’s hams from behind as he ran. But that was one bear who had decided he wasn’t going to die, and by Granny’s greasy gums, he set about proving it.

As the fire in his back began to take its toll, he finally took to a tree. Dogs were caught and leashed in a large hurry to get them out of harm’s way at last. It was William’s bear, so he and another hunter hoisted .44 magnums, one aimed at the neck, one at the shoulder. At the twin roars, out of the tree the demon soared in a maelstrom of fury—landing on his feet and STILL full of fight.

You want bedlam? Welcome to the Swamp.

One step off an Okefenokee Swamp dirt road puts you in thick, wet terrain like is pictured here. A south Georgia bear hunt with dogs is not for the faint of heart.

It sounded like a high-powered dove shoot as the semi-circled shooters unloaded all at one time, because suddenly and personally, this one has become everybody’s bear!

Instantly recognizing the poppop—quicker than a hyphen—I told Don, “That’s Dylan’s .40 cal Beretta automatic. Sounds like he’s at the Alamo.”

Followed by an overwhelming silence. Silent as only the Okefenokee can be.

When it was over, that big bruin had soaked up 11 rounds, eating at least four like M&M’s. They’re not all like this. More’s the pity, because this is what keeps me coming back. I can, however, do without one dying this hard and close enough to untie my boy’s boot laces.

Oh, it didn’t end here, either. On the day, we had six races, running until it got too late in the day to put in again.

For two years now, the folks here at the office have attempted to push an old flatlander like me into the mountains of north Georgia on a bear hunt, but the plans have fallen through at the last minute both times. I’ve mused on it, and come up with the following: first off, I ain’t going without Dylan and his Beretta; secondly, while stroking fur of the baddest bear I’ve ever seen, I hope them mountains got more room to run.