Bear Grease - Ep. 349: Trained by a Hound Dog - Ed Vance

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

In this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, Clay Newcomb interviews California native, Ed Vance. Ed shares his incredible story of determination and perseverance from growing up as a suburban kid just dreaming of hunting to moving to the Sierra Nevada’s in rural California, finding and training dogs, building relationships with hunting mentors, and developing a guide service as a successful dry ground mountain lion and bear hunting guide. Check out Ed's book at www.trainedbyahounddog.com A version of this interview played on Bear Hunting Magazine Podcast in 2019. If you have comments on the show, send us a note to [e-mail] Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. Next thing I knew, I was so doggone poor. I'd hurting for money so bad that I'd coast home. I'd find when I'd be driving home, I'd turn the motor off, so I didn't burn the gas for going downhill.

And the next thing I knew that I could leave the motor running, at least to get home. Man, you were catching so many lines you could leave the motor running when you were riding down the road. Yeah, that's right. Going down the hill. You've made it. Yeah. Yeah, I was really getting rich.

This is the story of houndsman Ed Vance in his 25 years guiding and hunting lions and bears in California. He started as a suburban kid in the 1940s with no connection to hounds or hunting, but would go on, as he says, to be trained by a hound dog. Ed published a book by that title in 2019. Some time ago, I traveled out to California to hear his story of struggle, perseverance, and success. firsthand. This story examines the drive of a young man to succeed. I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. My name is Clay Newcomb and this is the Bear Greece podcast where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in unlikely places and where we'll

tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. I'm in Posey, California, two and a half hours from Los Angeles and the southern one-third of the state. We're at the southern tip of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. There was a time when California was the place to be if you wanted to hunt big game with hounds. This place is gorgeous. This isn't what I expected. From this property, I caught lions and bears all over everything.

All of the stuff that you can see. Ed Vance points to a black hide draped over a couch. It's the only hide in this house. He's not going to tell me a story. He's going to show it to me. That was one of the toughest bears that I'd ever got my dogs after. I mean, I'd had others that were just as bad. but because there's the right here I'm going to explain to you

and I'm going to show you where it started, where it went to, and where it ended it from right here at this house. Ed's home sits on top of a scrub oak covered hill with a stunning 360-degree view. I envision this is what the mountainous regions of Kenya look like. There are yellow, parched grasslands on big rolling mountains. Emerald Green Oaks with round canopy stand alone, dotting the landscape like the dark rosettes of a jaguar. The hills flow with the smooth lines like that of a cat's shoulders, hips, and the swooping tail like the deep valleys, fully wooded and steep. Rimrock bluffs break up the terrain and places.

It's the kind of place you feel like you need a horse. This is some unusual and beautiful country. Ed points across a deep valley, and to the east is the long ridge that dominates the landscape. This particular bear that I got out after, it was in, started him in October, and it was just at the crack of dawn. And so we stopped, and I says, I'm going to walk up a canyon and see if I can get a bear started up there, and I'm going to show you where this is at. You see this ridge right in front of us, you can see a lone tree standing up there,

all by itself. Yeah. From that tree, if you went straight down into the canyon, straight down into the bottom, that's where they started this bear. By my best guess, they jumped the bear three miles from Ed's back porch. This hunt took place in the early 1970s. But the landscape doesn't look much different now than then. They pulled him out of that cannon.

He came out of that canyon, crossed onto this side of that ridge, and he skirted that ridge almost on the top all the way around and then where you can see that one high point he turned and he went to the opposite side of it now there was no roads to speak of and so I was falling him on foot

but the time I got to there I could hear those dogs it was a place called Portuguese Pass and Portuguese Pass is the furthest ridge that you can see yeah I see over there as far as you can see sea and he's just about to go over and I thought if he goes over that so there's a big valley

in between that it's called bull run basin the other side is called bull run basin anyways portuguese passes 7,000 feet in elevation and looks to be six or seven miles from where we're standing but the bear keeps running and ed was following the dogs by sound this was 30 years before GPS when you turn dogs loose with just a a leather collar on their neck. And they were, then he was, he was moving. And these dogs were moving as hard as they could. And that is like extremely steep and rough.

Yeah. And then I lost hearing of them. Now we're going to have to walk to another spot over here. I'm going to show you where this thing ended up at. We walked 40 yards to the north side of Ed's house, and the panoramic story continues. So far, we can see every rock step he and the dog's covered. So I came down through all of that and was late in the afternoon. Now, keep in mind, this started at about six in the morning.

Late in the afternoon, which would be about, I'm going to say about 3 o'clock, I crossed this road right here, the road that I'm living on. Wow. But I was about four miles up. And I took my CB radio to see if anybody was there. and so this friend of mine that had been hunting with me, he wasn't, I didn't even know he was going to be up for this day, but when I triggered my mic on my CB radio, Lewis answered,

and he asked where I was at, and I told him, by then the dogs had to have traveled at least 10, 12 miles. Yeah. Through this steep terrain that you're looking at. And I says, have you heard my dogs? And he said, yes. Your dogs, the last I heard him, he said, your dogs are down on White River by the campground.

Now, I'm going to show you where the White River Campground is that. We got to walk. Now we walk to the west side of the house, and far in the distance is a long ridge. It's hard to imagine traveling this far on foot in a single day. He wanted to come and pick me up, and I said, no, I want to just go across the country. I'm just going to keep it's all downhill, and I can travel pretty fast going downhill. and as long as I know that that's where they're at, and I says, so I'm going to go drop down to what's called Bear Trap Ridge.

This is Bear Trap Ridge right to our right. By this time, you've already traveled 12, 14 miles on foot. Close to that through the air. Well, through air miles. And so you're going down in these steep valleys and ravines and up mountains? Yes, because where the bear was started was at the 5,000 foot elevation. And Portuguese passes 7,000. Wow.

So they almost got, he almost went. You had to lose elevation and gain it many times. Yes, yes, back and forth, back and forth. This trek would have to push the limits of an elite athlete for a day's travel. But there's an ancient adrenaline download when a man is following as hounds, emphasis on his hounds. It can produce a superhuman drive. Ed describes how he crossed a big valley heading towards the White River, and he could now hear the dogs barking every breath,

but this bear just won't tree. He knew this bear, and he knew that it wouldn't treat. He was getting close to crossing over, and I got to where I could drop down, and I came head on onto him, and we walked right into each other. When he saw me, he spun, and I had this... How far were the dogs behind him? They weren't behind him.

They were all right alongside of him. Oh, they were baying him. They were right on him. Oh, wow. They were just walking him. Yes. But they knew you don't, a dog didn't dare take it and put his mouth on that bear. They knew that.

With his three or four dogs swarming the bear, Ed shoots as it spins, but misses the mark. And he took off. And if you'll see that farthest ridge that we can see over there in the distance. Yeah. I got my next shot at him, and I was almost at the bottom between those two ridges. In fact, there's some ranchers that they was listening to the whole thing. Oh, wow. And I shot and killed him right there.

Wow. So how many miles it is? I don't know. But I do know this. I had 20 minutes to get the hide off of him, and it was going to be dark. That's an incredible feat for the dogs, but an incredible feat for a man. Man. How far do you think you went?

I mean, really. In miles, actually, yes. If there was a dirt trail and I was walking it, 25. 25 miles. I think. I've never heard while I saw such a panoramic story where you could see such distance from the same hilltop.

And I'd say this is a good introduction to Ed Vance. I'd like to tell you how I met him. I'd say it was quite unusual for me. Several months ago, it was probably a little bit. that contacted me and said, I'd like to send you a book that my husband wrote. And I said, well, sure. And I get a lot of books, Ed. I really do. A lot of people, a lot of people write books, and I read a lot of books. And when I read this book, I could tell that the voice of this writer was someone special. I really did. And as I read the book, I thought, man, I'd like to meet that

guy. And so, anyway, thank you for hosting us. Welcome. We're sure happy to have you here. But it's an incredible and beautiful place. We're on the southern tip of the Sierra Nevada in a mountain range known as the Greenhorn Mountains. And Sequoia National Forest and Sequoia National Monument is right on these Greenhorn Mountains. It's a place that a lot of people really don't know about. Well, this morning we started off and we were in Los Angeles. Los Angeles, California.

seven lane going one way, seven lane traffic going the other. We drove two and a half hours and I mean we're 20 miles from a gas station. I mean, we're in more than that. More than that. We're in wilderness, really. You're 40 miles away from the gas station. For all the negative press California gets, this place is a natural wonder with an order of geologic and biologic diversity greater than any state. It's no wonder people flocked here.

wanted to ask Ed how he got into hound hunting. You know, I always, as a kid, I grew up in a suburb town by the name of Glendale in California. And in those days, of course, the population wasn't what it was today. And I kind of liked to act like I was hunting because right from our house, you just go off in the hills, they're just covered with a brush, just kind of make-believe, you know. But over time, I drifted away from that. And then I found myself working at an assembly plant for Chevrolet in Van Nuys, California,

and directly across the line from me was a guy by the name Sherwood Barrett. He was from Georgia. And Sherwood, he was a Mormon. And he told me, he said that he left Georgia, and he was on his way to Salt Lake City because he wanted to live there. But he had to go someplace and earn some money in the process. And so he was, I was putting gas lines, gasoline lines. on these cars as they passed through it 50-something an hour.

So we'd get a few moments every now and then to visit, and he started telling me about chasing these hound dogs in the Oke Phanokey swamp in Georgia. And it really caught my interest. I mean, it really did. What were they hunting down there? They were hunting hounds. Hunting coons.

Yeah. Yep. And so anyways, he told me these stories about this for what he was doing, and it just really caught my hands. interest and so I asked him I said sure where would you where do you go to buy these dogs and he told me says you go to like outdoor life they got these guys advertising I didn't know at the time that most of those guys were selling dogs that nobody wanted you know and people like myself would buy them because I didn't know what I was buying in the first place so anyways I started with that

and what was your intention was your intention to run lion or bear I just wanted I like And I like the idea of hunting, and hunting with dogs sounding good. So you would have been in your early 20s probably at this time? I was. So you just wanted some hunting dogs? I was like 20 years old. Yeah. And nobody in my family had ever even heard of it.

And so I ordered a dog from him. And I got a red bonehound. And he was a nice-looking dog, actually. He called him Buck. Buck was shipped in a wooden crate by rail from McKinnell in Arkansas, and he paid $35 for the dog and another $35 for the shipping. This first dog purchase coincided with a complete lifestyle change as Ed moved to the city of Ohio in rural California

where he bought some horses and got a job working at a self-service gas station, working 60 to 70 hours a week to cover his expenses. But he was about to meet somebody that would change his life. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen.

But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com.

I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. So I got this dog, and didn't know where to go hunting. So I took off and I went up in the mountains up by Ventura, which is just covered with brush.

I actually had a terrible place to try and hunt dogs. And I never caught anything with him. And then I started meeting different guys that had hound dogs, and they weren't doing any good either. And so I pulled around with those, and eventually I learned that what these dogs were chasing was not anything that could climb a tree at all. that the guys that I was hunting with, they were chasing deer,

is what they were chasing, you know. So time went by, and the next thing I knew I was introduced to a guy out of Utah by the name of Willis Butoff, which was a very well-known government hunter, and had caught hundreds of lions, an unbelievable number of lions. So I got with him and hunted with him a few times and bought a few dogs from him. from there I started learning about the difference between hunting dogs and taking dogs hunting and catching stuff. And so then from there, I ended up losing a couple of these dogs to 1080 poison, which was a terrible, terrible situation. And that was in Utah.

Ed wanted a dog that would tree mountain lions. And after a couple of years of messing around with dogs running deer, in 1962, he drove. He drove 700 miles one way and his 1951 GMC 3 quarter ton pickup to meet a man named Willis Butov in Utah. Can you imagine driving a truck like that that far? Ed was in his 20s and had never treated a single animal with his hound. In the book, he describes arriving at Butov's house, visiting for several hours before he asked the man, when was the last time you treat a lion?

Ed wrote, quote, he paused for a minute and appeared as though he was trying to remember back in time. And then he said, today. Butov had killed the lion that very day and couldn't remember it, and he had the hide salt on the back porch. Turns out, Butov had over 450 documented lion kills in Utah as a government hunter during the bounty years.

He was the real deal, and Ed was finally in the right place. Their relationship would last many years, and Ed bought several young dogs from him that never really worked out. A couple of years after their initial meeting, Ed made the trip again to Utah to hunt with Butov, and while in the mountains, they got word that Butov's father had passed away in Sundance, Wyoming. And to kind of show you what kind of man Ed was,

Ed volunteered to drive Butov 700 miles one way to the funeral in his new four-wheel drive International Scout in the dead of winter. Ed remembers they had to cover themselves with blankets while they drove so they didn't freeze. The entire trip they talked about dogs, Ed was eaten up every second he had with Butov. And what Butov didn't know is that Ed had taken out a thousand dollar loan with the hopes to buy one of Butov's lead dogs, not a young one, but a fully trained lionhound. And on the 1400-mile trip, he agreed to sell Ed one of his top hounds.

Ed finally had a legit lionhound. But listen to this. Tragically, and literally, the first time that Ed turned the dog loose after paying $1,000 for it, It was killed by 1080 poison, sodium flora acetate. This stuff was used to kill ground squirrels and predators in California and dogs that would even find the dead carcass killed by the poison, they themselves would get poisoned. Ed was devastated.

So he again was back in the business of looking for yet another dog. It was now 1964. And then I ended up meeting a guy that lived, he worked for a big farm out of Wasco, California. And he said that people told me that he had a hound that he might sell because of his age. I got in touch with him. Guy's name's J.D. Reynolds. And he had this red-tick hound that he said he would sell. And I bought him.

And I couldn't believe what I had bought. I went from not catching anything to speak of to every time I put that dog's foot on the ground, he caught something. And he didn't run deer, he didn't run coyotes. And he caught bobcats and raccoons and foxes every time he hit the ground practically. And from there I started learning the difference between good dogs, mediocre dogs, and dogs that just aren't any good. So on the book that I titled Trained by a Hound Dog, that title was really thinking about this dog, this red-take hound, which we called Bow.

Like I say, he was six years old when I got him. I was working as a carpenter framing houses in Thousand Oaks, California, where framing houses there as a carpenter was more like an athletic contest than it was anything else because it was all piecework and you didn't get paid much. If you're going to have any money at all, you're going to work like you're fighting fire from the moment you got there until there was time to go home, which I did. And I'd take and load Bo up on Friday nights, and I'd head off from the Ventura, California, to the Greenhorn Mountains, which is where we're at right now, which is where Boas was Ray, who'd actually trained.

He came from Arkansas. He was a red-tick hound out of the Albert Vaughn's stock of Englishtown, which eventually became the Albert Vaughan blue tick. If you're into hounds, you probably recognize the name, Albert Vaughn, who made quite the mark on the blue tick breed. But the most compelling part of this story is the examination of a young man's drive to succeed. Starting from absolute zero in the suburbs, it took him four years, a lifestyle change,

thousands of miles of travel, he went through about 10 dogs, countless dead ends, some of them tragic and out of his control, but finally he got started with this hound named Bo. Whatever you do in life, it's going to take some work, and there will be pain. He had plenty of excuses to quit. I think that first year, I'd get off work,

and I'd drive all the way up here, which was three and a half to four hours each way after working all week. And I think that first year I had Bowen, And then I bought a plot hound. I called him Pat, and he was like two years old when I got him. Bo wouldn't run a lion at all. I'd find a lion track that was fresh, and he wouldn't pay any attention. But Pat had been on some lions.

I got Pat from Willis Buttoff in Utah, and he'd been on these lions. So he was more eager to try and trail him than Bo was. Bo didn't care. I think I caught on Friday night hunting Friday nights and Saturday nights and Saturday. Saturday, right out of 100 animals that first year. And that was driving four hours each way to go after putting in five days of slave labor type work, you know, which is basically bobcats and foxes. So they tree these foxes and these little oak trees. They do tree here. It's called a cross fox. They're a lot harder to tree than the bobcats are. Starting from zero, Ed was now on his way. And what would happen with Boe is that after passing,

the plot started trailing lions, Bo joined him, and the pair became an extraordinary team at catching lions. But when you get into hounds, it starts the never-ending cycle of always needing more dogs. So he hit the road again, driving to Arkansas to meet with the blue-tick breeder Albert Vaughn, where he picked up some hounds that would become instrumental in his pack for years to come. Ed in his pack started treeing lions and bears consistently, which led Ed to want to change professions and become a full-time lion and bear outfitter. I started advertising, well, I'd hurt my back really bad in framing houses, and I just couldn't, I couldn't keep doing it. So I left Ventura, and I moved to this area where we're out here.

That was in 1966 when I moved here. I'd been, keep in mind, I've been hunting it for about three, four years before that. You've been driving four or five hours. traveling back and forth. But I moved here full time, started running some ads in a magazine, like Outdoor Live magazine, $50 a month for a one column inch ad. Wow. It was just about broke me to have to pay that advertisement, you know. And I was so poor.

I was poor as a church mouse as a Sands go, you know, living in the back of my truck at the same time. But anyways, I rented an old shack, moved into that, started advertising. and I started getting some customers. Ed bought a typewriter at a pawn shop and started printing out brochures for his lion hunts that he hung all across town. For a successful lion hunt, he charged $500, and if they treat a bobcat, it was an extra 50. It was now in 1966. And only three years prior, the bounty on Mount Lions was stopped and lions were being managed as game animals. Ed got his California guide license, which was.

was nothing more than a formality, and he was on his way. But in the late fall of 1967, something beyond his control happened. And it started to grow from there, you know, and then I ended up having a, I guess people started knowing a little bit about me being there. And I knew this guy lived up at Sugarloaf Village, and he said that he knew a guy that worked for the LA Times and he talked to him about what I was doing. and they wanted to know if they could come up here and they'd take them lion under,

they'd run an article in the Los Angeles Times. So, you know, I said, well, yeah, okay, let's do it. This was obviously time when it was a little more favorable to hunt lions in California. Yes, it was. So anyways, these guys came up, a guy named Dewey Lindsay, and with him was this photographer that works for the, he was a freelance photographer,

basically worked for National Geographic, And here I am, 25 years old, with about three hound dogs. And I got these high-powered professionals from Los Angeles that come up here and want me to catch a lion. They said, I only got three days to do it in. The pressure was really on because there's one thing to catch a lion, you're just out there hunting and you run into them and you catch them as they become available. But if you're going to do this as a profession and you've got people coming in, And you're on a no catch, no pay, which I was at those days.

No catch, no pay. No catch, no pay. If you didn't catch you, you didn't get paid anything. Was that common back then? Or is that just something that you wanted to do? No, no, that was common. That was the way it was everywhere. All of them through the mountain states, everybody, no catch, no pay.

You had to show for these people around and pay for their food and sometimes drive a couple hundred miles each way to an airport to pick them up and take them back. And if you didn't catch him a lion, you didn't get paid anything. So, gee, that's tough business. The pressure was on, you know. That was made for some good outfitters, didn't it? It separated them. It truly did.

Yeah. I caught him a lion on the third day. Third day. You're just dry ground line hunting, so you're just roaming around, freesting the dogs? No. Were you on your horse at that time? No, I didn't know.

I wasn't using horse. What I'd have to do is I just had to go places where I knew that lions would frequent. And, you know, they're kind of a strange animal in that you find lions that would use certain areas. And areas I close by, they wouldn't even go and bother over there. Wow. So I would go to these places where I knew that it either caught lions already, or I'd seen lions. I was really looking for some place where I could find a lion track, knowing that I hadn't already caught the thing. So anyways, we ended up catching the line and they

ran this story in the what's we call West Magazine to the Los Angeles time as a weekend color magazine and

through that ad it generated quite a bit of business for me next thing I knew I was so doggone poor I was hurting for money so bad

that I'd coast home I'd find when I'd be driving home I'd turn the motor off so I didn't burn the gas for going downhill but next thing I knew that I

I could leave the motor running, at least to get home. Man, you were catching so many lines you could leave the motor running when you were riding down the road. Yeah, that's right. Going down the hill. You've made it. Yeah. Yeah, I was really getting rich. During the years that I did all this, I wouldn't trade the memories of that for anything at all.

I mean, it was just something that was just really important to me, and I cherish those memories. A dozen years there, I made my living from that. If I had two nickels to rub together, it was because somebody gave me that for taking them hunting. Yeah. And if they gave it to me for taking them hunting, it's because they got the animal that they were hunting for, or they didn't give me the two nickels, you know. But I'll tell you what, I was so poor. It took every penny that I made to feed those dogs, buy new ones if I needed to buy a dog, pay for gas. Trucks didn't last very long in those days.

70,000 miles on a truck that I was driving. He was buying one brand new, and then 70,000 miles later, it was pretty rough shape. So anyways, from there, I stayed in California during the line of the bear. And I started hunting bears in northern California. I'd run into a guy and his two boys, and it was 1966. It was December 27th, I think.

and we caught this line, but we got a flat tire, and we were just about ready to leave. And we were right at the end of a dead-in road anyways. The end of the road couldn't be 500 feet away from us. I looked down the road, and there's these two boys standing there with four hound dogs, and asked Roy Stevenson. I said, do you know those kids? He says, I've never seen him in my life.

And there was a friendship that is still going on today. The two boys was Bobby Bridges and Gary Briggs. Bridges and their father, Jim Bridges, who is now passed on, and we hit it off really well. So the next thing I knew, I was up there taking bear hunts and Shasta County, and Jim Bridges was giving me a hand at it, and I ended up buying three of those dogs that were standing at the end of the road that day. Jim was one of the, actually one of the finest men that I've ever known in my life. You could believe anything he said, and you can't find any of them that you can do that with.

You never know when you're going to meet a friend that will stay with you for the rest of your life. Ed met the bridges at the end of a dead end road. I really like Ed's qualification of a good man. He said you could believe anything he said, which puzzled me for a minute at how rare Ed implied this trait to be. But I think a lot of people just tell you what you want to hear. They may not lie to you, but they don't tell you the whole truth.

truth and some people just aren't competent and what they say is often flawed not reflecting reality it's not that they blatantly lie it's just you can't really trust their judgment it made me stop and ask what integrity really is it's a powerful exercise to do a deep analysis of your personal integrity and only you with the help of god can do that last spring clay newcom and i collaborated with jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest.

It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut,

and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. I wanted to ask Ed about horses. I know in your book you talk about, and this is one thing that intrigued me, was you hunted on horseback a lot.

Was that one of your favorite ways to hunt, Ed, was hunting on horseback with the dogs free range and out? I did enjoy that. You know, the easiest way to hunt dogs is to turn the dogs loose and let them run down a road in front of a pickup and they follow them in a truck. But in lion hunting sometimes with what I was doing, see, I couldn't catch lions at just my leisure. it didn't make any difference. If I was out there and caught a line and I didn't have anyone with me, it didn't do me any good.

I didn't get paid anything and I was full time doing this. So I needed a paying customer to be with me and a paying customer had to be there when I caught it. I mean, I could catch the line the day after the guy left and it didn't do me any good because he left and he took his money with him

when he left, you know? So during those years, I had to go wherever the lions were at. It's like most of the hunts were like one week hunt, and during that week period of time, I had to come up with a lion, and if I didn't come with the lion, I just got to pay the bill all by myself, you know.

Did that happen very often, or did you catch most people lines? You know, I was running both the lion and bear hunts. I was hitting pretty close to 90%, which meant you, if you had a guy on a lionhound, you didn't get much time to do that. So you better know where there's one at.

And so to do that, I had to stay active, actively looking, even if I had nobody with me. Well, here comes the horse now. Okay, I drive roads. I look for tracks alongside the roads. I walk some trails, but you can only walk so far. Then there's other areas that you know that are pretty decent for having lions in them. But it didn't do you any good to go way back in the back country

if you're going to take what we used to call them dudes, take them in there to go catch a lion because you had to get them in there too, you know? So I would take, and I'd use the horse to scout, to constantly look, see if I could find a line. If I caught them, I'd make sure I'd let him go. But try and keep track of it so that you could hopefully find it again, which wasn't all that often.

I seemed like I'd catch lines and let them go and I'd never even see their tracks again. But anyways, how many did I catch? compared to driving roads, I call it more driving roads, just because you can travel faster. It's an efficient way to hunt. It is. You can travel much faster. And you're looking for an actual track, a dirt track in the road.

That's right. Lions, at least where I was hunting, they seem to use trails. They're obvious to you. You get to the point to where you could find a lion track. You're walking up a canyon. You find a lion track and it's going a certain direction. You look off in the distance You can just about say

If this line has gone that far Whatever that is a mile or whatever it is The chances are he went right through there And you almost You could predict where he was Yes you almost always right And the bears At that time in these Greenhorn Mountains

Which is where we're at The Bear Pop Place was very poor They'd had had a drought A severe drought in the late 1950s They said that the bears went clear to the San Joaquin Valley in those years. And in those years, they were using the poison called 1080 to kill ground squirrels and everything else. And 1080 is a kind of a poison that if a ground squirrel eats it and something comes along and eats the ground squirrel, it's going to kill that thing too. And I kind of think that between the drought and the widespread poisoning of ground squirrels in these mountains,

that it had just about wiped the bear population out for a long ways away. And it wasn't until about 1968, which would be about 10 years after that drought, that we started spawning bears showing up. Yeah, and the bears that would show up, they were adults. And most of them were big bears to boot, you know. It weren't finding anything of females with cubs. It's just pretty good-sized bears. And I think they just moved in here.

Up until then, up until about 1970, I was spending all my time for the bear huts up in Northern California. What Ed is saying checks out because males will be the first ones to repopulate new territory. And interestingly, as many know, today California has the most bears of any state in the lower 48. The last half century for black bears has surprised biologists by how quickly they can come back. That's a good thing. And back to horse hunting, Ed had a really cool truck with a stock rack in the bed, built in dog boxes that he hauled his horses and dogs without a trailer. I've been wanting one of those ever since I saw his.

What was your favorite to chase with your hounds? I love chasing bears. Did you? More than lions. Oh, that's hard to say. I'll tell you what I liked about the lion hunt. I really did enjoy catching a lion where the dog, would start with a track that was almost nothing. Where they'd up, and you had to have dogs had good cold noses

to where they'd, you'd find a lion track in the dirt, and you point at it, and they stick the nose down there, they couldn't smell it, but they knew you were pointing something out, and they'd start looking. They'd find a twig that had touched that animal's side, and they could smell it on that twig, and they'd bark, and you'd look at the ground where they're at, and there's that lion's track.

and you start from that and maybe 10 miles later you're looking at the lion that to me made it all worthwhile that was that was hunting dogs that wasn't hunting lions

that was taking dogs and seeing him at their very finest and I just loved that I know there's lots of lions that I'd caught people that I'd taken in the past after writing this book they'd asked me about it and I forgot all about it

because they were what we call a pop-ups, you know. Yeah. You cut the track and it was fresh. The lion wasn't very far away when you. So that was the easy one. Those are easy. There's pop-ups, you know, you forget about them. But those ones where you get out after those things, then you go all day long, just working.

Sometimes in the summertime where the dogs are just taking both of you. You've got to find the track. You help the dog, and the dog take the track a little ways where you couldn't find it. And next thing you know, they turn that thing into a movable tree. crack and like say that was satisfied. Miles later you're looking at it. There is in a tree. One thing that you did and this I noticed inside the book was you did some incredible athletic feats in my mind following these dogs. Were you a really great athlete, Ed? No. As a matter of fact, as an infant, I had tuberculosis. And they figured that I would

never be able to do anything athletically, but then I'd also it learned that your lungs can repair. And apparently mine did. And you know, I would go places that following a hound dog, I wouldn't even think of going there.

But it was because the dogs and I were doing this together. Let me put it like this. With the numbers of lions that I caught, I let a lot of them go. Just let them go. Same with bears. I let hundreds of bears go. I mean hundreds.

It was all about dog hunting. There's a lot of times, you know, I keep telling myself, no pain, no gain, you know. But if I could hear those dogs, I'm going to him. And there was one time in my entire career that my dogs treat a bear and I didn't go to him. I started to go to him, but had two guys with me. This was up in Shasta County. They treat a bear in this place called Hellsul. That's with the name of that canyon.

and that canyon is so steep that you had to hang on to stuff as you're going downhill otherwise you're going to just start sliding and you'll go all the way to the bottom and from where we started the bear they dropped off in a canyon that was about 1,500 feet in elevation to the bottom

of straight down and treated about a thousand feet up to the other side and we started going down to these dogs and had two guys with me One of them was really heavy sat, and I knew that he was never going to get there. The dogs were just blowing the top out of this tree. And across the canyon, from where we were standing, to where those dogs were actually tree, we could not have been a thousand feet through the air apart from each other.

And so I asked these guys, I said, what's going to happen if we get to the bottom? You're going to be able to get back to the stuff? because if you can't, there's no sense going down there. And they told me, they says, we'll never make it. So I started yelling, and I fired my rifle a couple of times, and it's really surprised me. I don't remember how many dogs I had. I usually had about four.

I like to, during the bear season, I like to have no less than three, and usually about four, I'd rotate the dogs. So you could catch bears with three, four, five hounds? Yes. Yeah. I'll tell you a little about my philosophy on that. But anyways, the dogs came to me, and I was totally shocked that they quit and came across that canyon.

But as we got out of there. You know, and it comes to numbers of dogs, Willis Butov. He was a guy, excuse me, he was a government hunter, but he also guided people as well. And he trapped for coyotes. He uses dogs for lions. and bears, stock killing lions and bears. And he told me early on, he said, if you have three or four dogs that can't catch a bear, you don't need more. You need new ones. And I found that to be true.

What Ed is saying isn't wrong, but as you take a wider look at America, every region is different, and in some places, bears are harder to tree than others. My buddies and houndsmen in the east would find reality out there that's way different and they typically need more dogs to consistently tree bears but you know there there is something that i'd like to say that um i haven't hunted hound since well i hunted with jim bridges one on one time up in susanville and that was 1995 we caught a bear and let it go of course and uh but i didn't i haven't had hounds since the late 1980s and um i kind of burned myself out. How long did you, just to give an overview, so you started, you started guiding in what

year and ended in what year? Okay, I started guiding in 1966, and in 19, late 1970s, I quit guiding. I didn't quit hunting. I quit guiding. Ed's story of struggles starting from zero and ascending to becoming an expert in his field is interesting and inspiring. But the thing that stands out to me is simple. It's just hard work to be good at anything. Everyone has challenges to overcome, and it's in those challenges that we find who we are. Challenge gives us identity. How we deal with those challenges determines what our name is. It's my hope that we never lose grit, determination, and drive towards the things that seem most out of reach to us. What I didn't hear inside of Ed's story was excuses.

Today it seems like a lot of people have a lot of excuses, including me at times, but I refuse to let those things define them. I've drawn a lot of inspiration from Ed's story, and I hope you have too. You can find this book by searching for trained by a hound dog by Ed Vance. I really thank Ed for this story.

And don't forget, California completely lost their rights to hunt lions and run bears with hounds. We can't ever take for granted what we've got. We're living in the glory days. And we've got to continue to fight for our rights as hunters and conservationists. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Greece, to Brent's This Country Life podcast, and to Lakes Backwoods University. keep the wild places wild because that's where the bears live. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts.

Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. if you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to.

I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good.

turkey noises and getting action. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.