But experience counts for more than technology. Bears may not have electronics, but they do have good noses. Bill Vaznis writes of how morning hunters learn that air rises, so that "if you want to stalk a morning bear in mountainous regions, you must start out above the bruin." The opposite is true in the evening, when you must stay below your prey.

My favorite story in the issue is by Larry Lightner, a 61-year-old field editor for Bear Hunting. Despite a couple of heart attacks and surgery just two and a half months earlier, he went on an early morning hunt with a guide and hounds in the wilds of New Mexico. Within an hour he finds that "the two bony points at the base of my butt-cheeks are screaming in pain every time they come in contact with the saddle."

By noon two of the hounds tree a bobcat, but the other dogs have scented a bear. The guide tells the suffering Lightner what he doesn't need to hear: that it's probably a juniper berry-eating bear, which are leaner than nut and acorn-eaters and "tend to run farther, faster and harder."

It's now late afternoon, and the pair have been leading their horses up and down steep hillsides, aware of how close they are to the baying hounds and the bear. Lightner reports that "for the last 20 minutes my heart has felt like it is being squeezed into a huge vice but I do not take my nitro pills for fear that I will be too dizzy to continue." The guide sees his plight and orders him to rest. The hounds themselves give up the chase, and the day is over.

He closes the report with the old adage, "Some days you eat the bear and other days the bear eats you."