Great bear dogs don’t always come from royal beginnings with grandiose pedigrees. Sometimes from the most humble beginnings, greatness arises. Such was true about the hound named Luther. 

“He was a half cur, half Walker. He looked like a purebred Black and Tan,” Scott McGlothlin said when describing his bear hound of a lifetime. That hound, Luther, is the subject of our Legendary Bear Hound feature this month and his story is a jam-up good ‘un. The story will reveal his amazing bear dog legacy spanning 13 years in some of the most demanding land a hound and hunter could be reasonably expected to exist in, much less excel. 

Scott McGlothlin is retired. He’ll be 60 the month this story is released. He worked “many a year” (as he puts it) in the southwest Virginia coal mines. “I worked in coal where the seam ran from 30 to 60 inches, but mostly in low coal, 30 to 48.” I grew up in coal mining country and I have always been astounded by the stories of tough men like Scott, who work deep within the bowels of an Appalachian mountain, in pitch-black conditions with less than a yard of clearance from ground to ceiling in which to work. He was tough, and Luther was just as tough. 

Luther came into Scott’s life at an early age, but not as a much anticipated pup from a well-planned litter. He recalled, “A boy that hunts with me raised these pups. There were five with tails and five without. My dad had gotten one of the pups. He let it run loose and someone picked it up. Another boy that hunted with us actually had Luther and one of his litter mates. He was having trouble with them fighting. He wanted to get rid of one and my dad said, ‘If you want to get rid of one of them, I’ll take it.’ Luther was almost a year old and we started fooling with him and got him started. He was never bred. He was probably three years old, and I had gone to him and another dog and found them face-barking each other. They weren’t fighting, just barking at each other. At first, I thought I was going into a bear bay. We ended up putting a band on Luther and the other dog as well, and that stopped the problem. He wouldn’t fight, but he was the instigator. He would just sit there and face-bark the other dog.”  

I was intrigued by this hound/cur crossbreeding and asked about the tails, realizing that some cur dogs are naturally bobtailed. “Did the Luther dog have a tail?” I asked.  

“Yes, Luther was one of the pups that had a tail. He looked identical to a registered Black and Tan. His mother was a cur my distant cousin had gotten and we started hunting her. She would tree, but when we would get almost to the tree she would leave it. We finally got that out of her,” he allowed. 

“What can you tell me about the sire?” I asked. 

Scott responded, “He was a Treeing Walker. He didn’t have a real good nose, but he was a good bear dog. I don't know anything about his breeding. He was owned by Aaron Stillwell.” I then asked if Aaron was related to famous Virginia bear hunter Estill Stillwell. “They may have been distantly related,” he replied. “Aaron was a turkey hunter. I talked him into bear hunting, so he got some dogs and he had some good ones. I think Luther’s nose came from the cur side of the cross.” Normally, one would think the colder nose would come from the sire’s side of the pedigree. 

Still hung up on Luther’s breeding, I asked about his dam, the cur female. “Johnny Hubbard trades on dogs quite a bit and Aaron got her from Johnny. She acted like someone had been abusing her, but we got her out of that. She looked like a Black and Tan and was really small as bear dogs go, but she was fast. She opened on track and she was pretty gritty. If we got onto a bad bear, she would get torn up pretty bad.” I asked if her sire, the Walker dog, mixed it up with a bear. “He didn’t have the nose and was not as gritty as she was,” he confessed. 

Scott started hunting Luther when he was about a year old. “I don’t remember the first time but when I would take him out at first, he would start a track and a lot of times we would wonder if he was right. By the time he was three years old, he would trail and trail and it would finally get to where the other dogs could smell it and go on. We realized then that he was going to be a cold-nosed dog.” Scott’s words remind me of my own experiences as a young houndsman hunting virtually the same type of terrain and with several crossbreds, the hounds of our hunting companions. Hunters there don’t get too excited if dogs don’t start right away. I think they may be more patient than hunters of my experience that hunt elsewhere. 

“I couldn’t really tell you the number of bears that we did start with the Luther dog,” Scott said. “One time that sticks in my mind was when another friend of mine, who was a checker on the hunting club, was checking memberships of those hunting and called on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. There was snow on the mountain and as he was checking that day, he found a big track at around 11 o’clock. He called me immediately and said he had found the track. I said, ‘Well, it’s Christmas and we won’t be able to come today.’ I had permission to hunt that club and we went over there the next morning at daylight, probably around seven or so. I told him, ‘I don’t know for sure how old a track he can take, and I don’t know how long it has been since the bear had gone through when he found the track.’   

“I got Luther out and let him stick his nose in the track; he probably went about three tracks when he opened. I said, ‘I think he’s going to take it!’ I turned him loose and he went right on opening. I know the track was at least 12 hours old from when he found it, but I didn’t know when the track was actually made. I put another dog behind him and that dog went right after him, not opening and probably just following Luther. Those two were the only dogs we got in there. The track went toward Saltville, Virginia and into the Clinch Mountain Wildlife Area in what they call Big Tumbling. Luther had caught the bear and was just walking it. We got more dogs in and finally, they crossed a road. There was a girl with us and she shot at the bear two or three times, and another guy shot at it two or three times, and we still let the bear get away. It was a 400-plus bear. I ended up catching Luther and another of my dogs at about nine o’clock that night crossing a road.”  

McGlothlin has a storehouse of memories about Luther and the hunts they shared over the 13 years of the dog’s beloved life. Here’s another jewel: 

“In the same area called Ward’s Cove, we were in there one day,” he begins. “There was snow and the dogs were treed and we were going to them. We found another big track in the snow about 10 or 11 o’clock that day. We killed the bear the dogs had treed and I didn’t know how old the second track we found near the one we killed was, but we went back in there the next day and started tracking the big track. Luther would put his nose in the track and I kept him on the leash. We tracked it a long way. It was going off the top of the mountain. Luther was bad about getting away from you, and it was hard to get dogs to him. He knew right where to go to find the bear.”  

I had to interrupt Scott’s story to clear something up for my readers. I asked him, “The country you are hunting in is not like hunting around cornfields or open woods in the upper Midwest. You're talking about wilderness country, right?”    

He answered, “Yes, once you get on top, from where we go in and walk to the other end of the mountain is like 12 miles. If we don’t hit a track, then we are walking 12 miles to come off to the road. That day we went back and got on that big bear (I think it weighed 460), and we tracked it out through there. I kept Luther tied. It started to go over on the south side of the mountain and we started getting out of the snow. I had a Redtick pup and was letting it run loose. I could see where the bear walked in the patches of snow. A squirrel ran in front of me and the pup saw the squirrel; when it got about 100 yards, it started barking. I thought, ‘That pup has treed that squirrel.’  

“The bear track was going that way and when I got down there, the pup was up on some rocks barking and Luther started barking hard. I hollered on the radio, ‘Luther acts like he smells this bear here close.’ I turned Luther loose and there was a vee-shape right down through the rocks. Luther went straight through there, and the bear stuck his head out of a hole and blew really hard. Luther couldn’t see where the bear was. He went through the vee and jumped right where that bear stuck his head out of the hole. The bear’s rear end was back toward the hole. The bear reached out with both front paws and grabbed Luther by both hips, then just sucked him right back in that hole.  

“I didn’t have a gun with me and I was going to get down there and squall or whatever was needed to get the bear to turn him loose. The bear came out of the hole and went right by me. I called the boys and said, ‘Come on down this way, it has come out of the hole.’ They started packing dogs to it and Luther came out of the hole. He just went into shock. It messed his back right leg up pretty bad and the last few years I hunted him, it would bow out on him. But, he did get over it and I got to hunt him for another five years.” 

Luther was 13 years old when he passed. He was only hunted a couple of times in the 2023 training season. “I turned him loose and when he started up over the bank, I noticed he staggered backwards,” Scott recalled. “I didn’t think much about it, but on another day they took a track and I thought I was going to have to carry him out. He was staggering and falling on his back end. That was the last time I hunted him. When he got torn up by the bear that injured his hips, I kept him in the house for six or eight months. My grandbaby loved Luther. She would lay on the floor with him and put a blanket over him. I found him dead in his box one morning.”    

It’s tough when we see old dogs getting to that place. When we have one like Luther we often wonder how he could be that smart and have that much endurance? In tribute to an obvious legend, here is one last story of Luther and his uncanny ability to find, trail, tree, and bay black bears in some of the most rugged country on the planet. 

“He knew right where to go to find a bear,” Scott recalled. “It was late muzzleloader season, and a guy had shot a bear and couldn’t find it. It was late in the evening when he called me. I told him that we couldn’t come that evening, but we would come the next day. We went up there and the guy took the boys up where he last found blood. We put Luther on it; he went around the hill and they started putting dogs behind him. Those dogs acted like they didn’t know what was going on. They didn’t have the nose he had. He trailed around a couple of hollows and went to baying. They went out there and he had a small bear under a rock, but they were afraid it was a sow bear with some cubs. So, they continued to hunt and stumbled upon some blood. They thought it was the bear the guy had shot. 

“They turned Luther loose and he went toward the top on the north side. They got on top and released dogs, but they could not get any of the dogs to go with him. Every now and then they would still find blood. They got over on the north side going toward Luther when they finally got some dogs to go on the track, but they were way behind him. There was some snow on the north side and they were finding a lot of blood over there. They found what they thought were cub tracks and then they found a big track. Luther went around the mountain and he found the bear in a hole. They got to the hole and they found a lot of blood there. They didn’t want to kill the bear because it might have been a sow with cubs. But I told them, ‘Boys, you may as well kill the bear because it’s probably mortally wounded.’ They ended up killing it, and it was a boar that weighed 175 lbs.”