There’s something to be said of the canine athlete that gives his all, time after time, grueling bear hunt after grueling bear hunt.  But the admiration for such a great bear dog reaches a whole new level when that hound suffers a severe injury and despite the physical limitations the injury imposes, continues to do his or her job and not only that, but continues to lead the pack in every area in which we judge great bear dogs.  Such a bear dog is the hound we honor with this article, a bear hound of wide acclaim throughout his entire, albeit short, life from the tender age of three months to his untimely death in the heat of battle at five years old.  Such a dog was the Plott Hound Daniels’ Ace.   

Keith Daniels is strapping man in the prime of life.  Born in the coastal area of southeastern North Carolina in the town of Kelly, population 544, has worked in his family’s trucking business for twenty-two or twenty-three years by his account.  “We were big time in the business but have been backing out.  We hit it pretty good in the spring and summer and we buy and sell equipment,”  he said.  I rather suspect the fall and winter months are reserved for his passion, bear hunting with hounds that he readily admits is an all-consuming fire within him.  Living and hunting an area of the country that is flush with bears, the biggest black bears in the nation, no doubt keeps the fire burning at a fever pitch.  Keith and he hunting partners have killed lots of bears and some really big ones.  “J. P. Howard was my mentor.  He’s sixty-five years old now and killed a 610-pounder last year,” Daniels said.  “In fact,” he continued, “we killed a 610 and 615 the same day.  We let a lot of them go. But we do kill a lot of big bear.  I was hunting in Hyde County and we killed the number two state record bear for North Carolina at 784 pounds.”  I think we’ve established that Daniels and his party of friends are bear hunters.   

Daniels was drafted 15th pick out of high school by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1998 Major League Baseball draft as a left-handed pitcher.  “I grew up bear hunting,” he said.  “I think I went on my first bear hunt when I was eight or nine years old.  Some guys from the mountains joined our deer club and would come down and stay.  I got into it and some of the bear hunters, Jerry Phillips and J.P. Howard took a liking to me and each time they would come I would go hunting with him.   From there I hunted right on and killed my first bear when I was twelve hunting in Holly Shelter.”  Holly Shelter is a seventy-eight-thousand-acre public game land near the North Carolina coast.  “It’s bad hole but I killed my first bear there.  I hunted on through high school and then I played baseball in the minor leagues for four years and came back went to work and got into bear hunting.  I got a bad case of the bear-hunting affliction and I haven’t been able to shake it.  It’s been worse than Covid,” he said.   

Daniels started the group of bear hunters that he enjoys hunting with today.  I asked him at what stage in his bear hunting career did our legendary bear dog Ace come along?  “I was still working on developing a good pack of dogs,” he said, “and I met Doug McNab when he was hunting in Hyde County.  He operates the Cold Track Outfitters in Bobcaygeon, Ontario.  Around 1997 or 1998 I made my first trip to Canada and we became friends from that point on.  I had my pack of dogs and they were all pretty much mixed up.  I had different breeds.  I had a couple of English dogs that were good solid dogs and good trail dogs.  One was very cold-nosed dog that was our leader and then once I met Doug, he is a Plott man through and through, I started getting into the Plotts a little bit and got a couple from him and liked them.  So then we started exchanging dogs and hunting back and forth and we still do today.  We still have dogs that he takes them up there every year.  The only years we missed were the pandemic years.”  

“I had some of Doug’s dogs down here,” Keith continued, “a female that that he had, she was a trail dog out of Bearpath Gunner and Star Mountain breeding, came into heat.   I knew a dog down here, a dog named Snake that was owned by Doug and Hank Bond.  He went back to the Alabama Hammer dog of Orville Roberts’.  He came from Henderson Johnson.  We got her bred but she was a small female and she had a lot of trouble.  Her milk dried up and we lost all of the pups except one. My sister-in-law bottle-fed him and we named him Ace because he was the only remaining one.”  

Ace was three months old when Daniels started to work with the pup.  “I put a lot of time in him,”he said  “The first time I was teaching him to road hunt.  I put and e-collar only on him.  We roaded on dirt road and he would chase rabbits and so forth and I got him off of that when he was about eight months old.” 

“He was about 8 months old and I got him off of that.  One afternoon my wife and I were riding around and we had him with us.  We were going to rake around some bear baits.  I put him on the road and she was helping to make him stay in the road.  We drove to where the bait barrels were and I went out and raked a couple of lanes.  I came back to the truck and I asked my wife who had been reading a book, “Where’s Ace?”  She said, “I don’t know, the last time I saw him he went around the back of the truck.”  So, I started calling him and I didn’t hear him.  We drove around the block, stopping to listen and all of a sudden, I could hear him.  I drove around to get closer and he was bayed, and I mean every breath.  I thought, holy moly, what am I going to do.  I turned the truck around and she said, ‘What are you going to do?”  I said, “I’m going home and pack him.’  I went home and got a couple of more dogs to put in there to him.  It turned out to be a sow bear.  Now these were pretty good dogs that I sent in there to him and the bear put both of them out.  They had holes in them but Ace was still in there blowing every breath.  By this time I had called my brother and they were coming around to try to help me catch him.  It was getting pretty close to dark so I sent the other dogs back in there and I won’t repeat what I told them but they went back in there and stayed that time.  By then they weren’t that far from the road as it started getting dark.  By then it was 9:00 and I caught two of the dogs but I didn’t get Ace because he was right behind the bear.  He was eight months old and it was the first time he had ever smelled a bear.  My brother had the lights on in the truck and he saw the bear in the road and Ace was all around the bear.  He got out of the truck and the bear ran down the road.  My brother Brian got his hands on Ace and he had nine holes in his hide, from the back to the front.  It still blows my mind to think about it now but it’s the truth.  From that day forward he kept getting better and better.”   

Ace was a beautifully built dog with great muscle tone.  He was a blackish brindle in color and was, in Daniels’ words “a real tight-built, athletic dog with long legs and a slender body.  He was rough-haired with a slicker tail.  He was bred three times.  He first was bred to a pair of sisters named Shadow and Sadie.  There were ten puppies and they were small when Ace got killed but that’s getting ahead of the story.  “The foundation of my pack came from these two sisters.  I then bought a female from Ralph Sheffield that was heavy Weems-bred on the top and bottom of the pedigree.  I bought her from him just to breed to Ace.  All three litters had lots of nose and lots of drive.”   

“The female that Ralph had was a really good little female,” Daniels said.  “Several of the puppies made good trail dogs and they were gritty.  Ace was a tight dog.  There was no quit in him.  What was so amazing about him was how he was ‘off the court.’  He would sleep in the bed with you and when I was at the dog pen I would turn him loose and he would just lay around.  One of the photos I have of him is of the drawing that a girl drew for me.  It’s of him laying in the enclosed dog pen.  He would ride with me in the front of the truck, just a real laid-back demeanor but when you put him in the truck to go hunting he was a totally different dog.  I’ve always looked for that in a dog since him and the best dogs I’ve had since him have had that.  They know when the light switch turns on.  A dog has to have the head sense.  They can have all the physical ability they want it’s like a person that can have all the physical ability they want to but if they don’t have the mindset they can’t succeed,” he said.   

Keith was really getting into the Plott dogs and around 1996 or 97. “I was hunting Ace more that spring and Doug’s season was coming in in August,” Daniels said.  “He wanted to take Ace up there so I went to New York to meet him and he got the dog.   Ace was only nine or ten months old.  He saw right off the bat what I was seeing, that the dog had an amazing nose and ability to just take a cold track and just fly on it when the other dogs aren’t even opening when you turned them loose.”  

McNab, now around sixty-five, is and excellent houndman by Daniel’s account.  “We were both amazed at what we were seeing,” Daniels said.  “He was telling me a story about North Bay.  It’s like a no man’s land.  He had some guide service land up there.  They put the dogs on a bear and it ended up being late afternoon and they got all the dogs back except Ace.  Ace’s telemetry collar was beeping from way back in there.  Doug was like, ‘I’m not leaving the dog in there, I’m going in.’  So they went in, tried to get him and couldn’t, and went home.  They came back the next day and they finally got a signal on him.  There were no roads there except some snowmobile trails and so he and his buddy backpacked in.  It was an all-day deal and they finally got a signal through the attenuator on the system but they never heard him.  He was only ten or eleven months old so they were worried about what was going on.  They ended up not getting him that day and it started to rain but they found a camp in there on a lake and spent the night.  They got up the next morning and they went outside to try to track him and the system was beeping hard.  He ended up coming to them in the camp and that was the third day,” Daniels continued.  “They had a six or seven-hour walk back out and as they are walking out, they are taking turns leading Ace was totally worn out.  His feet are hurting.  All of a sudden, they came across the track of a bear that has crossed the road and slid down the bank.  Ace went ballistic, pulling on the lead and barking.  Doug looked at his buddy and asked, “What do you think he’s going to do if I turn him loose on this track?”  His buddy said, “I don’t know what he’s going to do but I know what I’m going to do.”   

Daniels remembers a hunt in Canada the following season.  “We went up to hunt with Doug and got on a really big bear and it became a split race.  Ace and three dogs were on a big bear.  The others had split off on a smaller bear,” Daniels said.  “I ended up going with a friend of mine to the treed bear.  Doug and another friend of mine, Chris Barnes went to the small pack.  It was a big bear that had backed up to a big cypress tree in the swamp.  They couldn’t see the bear.  They decided that one would go to the left side and the other to the right.  Doug thought he knew where the bear was going to break.  About the time Chris tried to look around the tree he heard a big commotion and he still hadn’t seen the bear but he saw a dog tumbling end over end through the air, six to eight feet off the ground.  It was Ace.  The bear had hit him and he was turning flips through the air.  Chris looked at the dog, which appeared to be alright, and Ace looked at him and then turned and went right back to baying him again.  Doug eased around the tree in an attempt to see the bear and it lunged out at the dog and Doug shot him.  The bear field-dressed at 518.”   

Ace was on 26 kills before he was 16 months old.  He got his front leg broken at sixteen months.  A sow bear, weighing 256 pounds was stopped in a thick place.  The bear broke his front leg.  “We packed to much in that thick bay.  We couldn’t get to it to get it killed and we suffered some casualties for sure,” Daniels said.  “He never lost the whole leg but he just couldn’t use it.  They pinned it but it didn’t work because it was broken in the joint.  We spent $2500 on him.  We would routinely bet anybody with a four-legged hound to put down with him and he would come out first.  You could see him on these big canals.  We hunted then in the big canals.  He only had one front leg to pull himself up but he would come out of there.”   

Ace was only five years when he died of injuries inflicted by a bear.  Daniels remembers, “It was a week before the season came in.  I hadn’t taken him all spring while I was training other dogs.  We were going to go train in the Green Swamp.  I took him just to limber him up and get him ready for the next Monday.   We couldn’t find a track that we could jump so we came up with a plan to just free-cast into a block that we knew held bear.  He went in there and started opening and then baying.  It ended up that the bear would weigh between 400 and 450.  The boys with me packed a bunch of aggressive young dogs and it ended up being a bad fight.  They had some that came out.  My buddies and I knew when we saw them come out that my dogs were tight meaning they would stay with the bear.  We probably got into the bay five or six times and would pull every dog back.  The pack was right there within five to eight feet of the bear, in his face barking at him and each time Ace would be right beside the bear’s head either on the left side or right side.  Every time we would get close to the bear, he would move.  This went on for three or four hours.  Everyone had it in their minds to try to catch Ace.  We ended up with two or three dogs left on the bear and we heard a yelp.  I was tracking him and could tell that he was coming out.  When he came up to me I noticed that his belly was hanging down, all blue. I put him in the truck.  It was Saturday and the vets weren’t open.  I went to the emergency vet in Wilmington.  They did emergency surgery and removed part of his stomach.  I asked them to try to preserve his reproductive organs realizing that breeding him could possibly be his only activity going forward.  They said we think he’s going to be okay.  I went by Monday and they let me see him.  He was glad to see me.  They called me later that night and told me they had to rush him back into emergency surgery and he didn’t make it.  For four hours nobody could get close enough to him to even grab his tail.  He always bayed to the left or the right of the bear’s head.  If the bear’s head moved, he moved.  He never lost focus.