October in New Mexico

Freecasting hounds in the west & riding mules is a classic way to hunt bears - and it ain’t easy.

- Clay Newcomb

We cut the hounds loose with the rising sun as the late-October air turned our breath into visible vapor. Calling each hound by name out of the box, Strait put the collars on the dogs with nary a lead strap ever touching them. We’d saddled the mules in the dark before we left, but my mule, Izzie, had thrown a youngster-mule fit, the bucking kind, for no good reason. Luckily, I wasn’t on her back. Now, standing tied outside the trailer, though calmer, her feet shuffled nervously. This was her first morning in New Mexico.

Strait’s mules are seasoned western saddle mules and they stood like granite monuments eroded into shape by hundreds of mornings of the same routine. It was late in the year to be bear hunting, but Strait Sedillo, a lifelong New Mexico resident said, “It’s a good time to catch a good boar.” We’d give it a try. Strait is 25-years old, he’s six-foot-six-inches tall and built as tough as a ponderosa pine. He’s a man of few words, but the ones he speaks are substantial. Wearing leather chaps, with the stock of his 30.30 protruding from the scabbard, Strait can’t hide his Western roots. He once dunked a basketball after a fast-break steal at a high school game despite his no-nonsense coach forbidding such flagrant showmanship. Like many of us, he’s driven by an unexplainable connection to his dogs that defies modern logic, but makes sense in the light of deep human history. Humans hunting with dogs is as primitive and natural as our attraction to fire. The partnership between man and dog is older than recorded history can recount. Using them for protection and gathering meat, the biological success of the human species has been propped up by the domestication of dogs. It’s anthropology, not showmanship.