The bear left a print that measured 5 inches from side to side across the front pads. The track was a day old, but there was a chance the dogs might take the trail. We set the dogs loose down an old logging road. The chase was on. We stopped after two miles, at a creek swollen with snowmelt. The hounds were up the hill. Their howls drifted in and out on the wind. They treed a bear.

Author Gary Lewis used a .45/70 Marlin Guide Gun to take this bear in 2008. The bruin measured 6 feet from nose to tail. This black bear's pelt was black, but it's more common in the High Sierras for the pelt to look like chocolate. Photo courtesy of Gary Lewis.

I shoved four .45/70 rounds into the tube, jacked one into the chamber, then eased the hammer down, setting the Marlin Guide Gun's hammer at half-cock. We crossed the creek and pushed up the hill toward the noise of the dogs.

At 100 yards from the tree, we could see the dogs running in circles, manzanita bushes shaking. For a moment, we thought the bear was on the ground, but then we saw it, halfway up a small Ponderosa pine.

"He's coming down," someone yelled. The bear spun to the other side of the trunk with only his legs showing on my side.

There was a pack of redticks, blue­ticks, Walkers and Plott hounds beneath the bruin, six humans nearby and a good chance someone would get hurt. I found the bear as he turned to negotiate a branch on his downward slide. In a moment, he would be in the dogs. Rifle up, I thumbed back the hammer and pulled the trigger.

The bear shivered at the impact and began to drop. I hit him two more times as he fell through the branches to make sure he was finished when he hit the ground.

With the dogs leashed, we looked at the bear. The boar that left the 5-inch track measured 6 feet from nose to tail and 6 feet 6 inches from paw to paw. It was jet black with a cream-colored V on its chest, an uncommon black-colored black bear in California's Sierras.

BEAR TRUTH
According to senior wildlife biologist Doug Updike, California's black bear population has increased dramatically over the past 25 years.

"In the early '80s we had about 10,000 bears. In the last 30-plus years, we've seen a three-fold increase," Updike said.

Recent estimates put California's bear population between 30,000 and 35,000 animals spread over 52,000 square miles. Today, the state ranks among the top black bear destinations in the country.

In 2007 (the last year for which data was available), 1,861 bears were taken in California. Of that number, more than half of the successful hunters used trailing hounds, while 31 percent took their bears while hunting deer.

Archery hunters accounted for 8 percent of bears harvested. On average, successful hunters spent four days in the field. Twenty-one percent took their bears on private land. Overall success was 7.6 percent.

Two subspecies, the northwestern black bear and the California black bear, inhabit the state. The crest of the Klamath Mountains separates the cousins. Variations in terrain, water availability and vegetation types allow biologists to divide populations of black bears in three habitat categories: North Coast/Cascade, Sierra and Central Western/Southwestern.

NORTH COAST/CASCADES
Close to half of the statewide bear population make their home along the North Coast and into the Cascade Mountains. Here, bear densities range from 1.0 to 2.5 bears per square mile. Most of the bear habitat lies within areas that are owned by the public or by private timber companies.