By Steve Fielder

This story is one about diversity and loyalty in unexpected places. It’s a revelation of the uses of resources for occupation and recreation. It’s also the story of the reversal of roles, of students becoming teachers and of learners leading the learned. At the heart of the story are hounds in pursuit of bears, bobcats, coyotes, and raccoons, and the recognition that perhaps breed, despite long standing loyalties, doesn’t matter as much as the outcome. This is the story of a Northwoods lad that took to hound hunting at a very young age and learned a lifelong trade that became his passion for 61 years. Michael Piontek, a career lumberjack and houndsman, was 10 years of age when he got started.

Piontek says, “I’ve had hounds for 51 years. I’m now 61. I was born in Wabeno, in the northeast part of the state, right in the heart of logging country. I’m self-employed in the logging trade and I work year round. I met famed Plott man, Everett Weems, when I was 10 years old. When he was 77 years old, he came up to hunt with me and he told me when he was ready to leave, ‘I’ve owned and hunted with a lot of good dogs in my life, but none better than yours.’” 

Continuing to speak of one of the most famous crosses in the history of Plott bear dogs, that of Weems’ Plott, Butch, to Weems’ Plott, Jill, was crucial to Piontek’s early hunting experiences. He had gone out with Larry McKenzie as a kid, who lived about a half-mile down the road from his parents. McKenzie and Weems partnered in the breeding and promotion of the Weems-bred dogs for many years. Piontek recalled, “We hunted in the Spring. The first bear I saw treed by dogs was Larry's Butch/Jill-bred dogs. We trailed a bear off the back side of a dump. The dogs caught it and treed it, but it came out of the tree. They caught it again and it stayed put. That was my first bear tree.”

As part of the interview process for this article, Piontek and I discussed the Weems Butch and Jill dogs. My father and I owned two hounds from the cross and, naturally, I was interested in his experiences with them. He said, “The first time I hunted with Weems’ Punie, he treed a porcupine. Larry started Punie on bears and Everett wanted the dog back, so he took him home to Illinois.” I hunted with Punie several times and bred a female to him that figured heavily in our breeding program. I never hunted bears with Punie, but my father did when Weems brought him out to West Virginia in the mid-seventies. Somewhere along the way, Piontek strayed from the Plott path and began to hunt, although not exclusively, with Treeing Walker hounds. He described the process this way:

“I started with Plott dogs. Fifteen years into it, I began to train dogs for other hunters and did so for six summers. With taking seasons occurring in December in Virginia, hunters wanted to have their dogs ready instead of laying them up all summer. To do so, they would send them to me. The dogs they sent were some really good Walker dogs and were mainly Finley River bred, a popular strain of Walkers from back in the day. Bobby Crawford, Dennis Nicely, John Henry Ritchie, and his cousin, Bruce Ritchie, were some of the guys that sent dogs to me. Most of my clientele were from Virginia.

“I was using Plotts to tree the bears for the trainees, but these Walker dogs inspired me. Part of what I was looking for to improve the dogs I had, I found in these Walker dogs. They inspired me because they barked more on a cold track and, overall, they were better open trailers. In many cases, the offspring I had from the Butch and Jill-bred Plotts were silent trailers. After 15 years of hunting, I found myself hunting Plotts and Walkers.

“Some of the first of the Walker trainees were a pair of hounds named Buck and Bobby, littermates sent to me by Bobby Crawford of Fulks Run, Virginia. It was probably in the mid-nineties,” Piontek continued. “They were probably a year old and were totally green dogs. They had never been hunted. A lot of the dogs I received, usually totaling six to eight dogs a month, had never been on a leash. It was crazy. 

“The first thing I had to do was correct them for running deer,” he said. “They were deer crazy. The first bear I put them on was a treed bear that was coming out of a tree. That set them on fire.” Piontek began to work the Buck and Bobby pair into his pack and two months into their training they would run, bay, and tree bears. The following summer, Crawford gave Piontek half-ownership in the male hound and Piontek had him every summer after that. He would send the hound back to Virginia for the month of December. Crawford had told him, “You hunt him hard all summer and I’ll hunt him hard the rest of the year in the mountains.” The plan kept Buck and the others in great shape, and tuned them up for bear hunting year round. 

I asked Piontek to describe Buck. He replied, “He wasn’t tall or leggy as some hounds are. He was a big, stocky-built hound, and when he was in shape, his endurance was out of this world. After three hours into a race, he would leave everything else behind. I saw him run bears 7-12 hours at a time.” I asked him to tell me more.

“He had a chop mouth on the tracks and trees, and was a wide open trailer,” Piontek said. “He was an outstanding rig dog with a real good nose. I believe he would have treed until he fell over dead. He liked bears and wouldn’t mess with coons. He often would split off from other dogs and get on a bear by himself. Maybe the others would be messing with a coon and he would get out of there. When we would catch a bear, Buck would have holes in his hide from one end to the other. He worked a bear really close and hard.” Buck and Bobby were about identical in Piontek’s view and he ran them primarily as a pair that first year. Crawford then decided to keep the female in Virginia and didn’t send her back to him the following summer. 

Piontek spoke of a hunt he and Crawford took the first time he visited after sending the dogs to Michael. “After I had been running the two dogs for a month,” Piontek remembered, “Bobby came to hunt for a week and a half. He told me, ‘I paid you to run the dogs for two months, but would you let me see the dogs go just one time?’ It was hot and sticky and we had a hard time striking bears. We put on a small bear at 11:00 at night, and they were still running and fighting the bear at 11:00 the next morning. We caught Buck at noon that next day. When I went to load the dogs, Buck’s feet were swollen to twice their normal size. The hounds had been running in blackberry and raspberry briars and all kinds of thick stuff. Bobby didn’t come out of her box, but Buck came out and jumped onto his box. He wanted to go, but he couldn’t. His feet were swollen and his eyes were matted shut. He had run 35-40 miles the day before.”

Piontek recalls several hunts with Buck. “Here’s what he would do if we put several dogs out on a bait,” he said. “I recall it was the last year I hunted him. It was back in the beeper-box days.” Piontek is describing hunting with radio telemetry equipment commonly referred to by hunters as “beep-beep”, the equipment’s method of indicating the direction of the hounds by emitting audible signals. “Buck was going one way and the other dogs were going the other. I needed to go with the group and had to leave him. Later, I would go and find him treed by himself. He was such a good track dog that if there were two bears on the bait, he would take a track by himself. I’ve hunted hundreds of dogs and I’ve owned 10 dogs that I would consider exceptional track dogs. Buck was the best of them.” 

Piontek describes himself as a Plott man training hounds of all breeds for others. He began hunting bears with Plotts and he still hunts them. He said, “I would say the second summer I had Buck, we had lots of baits. I raked everything.” Raking the dirt around baits gives the hunter needed information about the species and size of the animal that visits the bait. “If we had a bait with coons in addition to bears on it, we would put Buck and a Plott female named Rose on it. Buck wouldn’t fool with coons. If there were no coons at the bait, I would put down a pair of Plotts named Nick and Trouble. Nick was a grandson to Weems’ Punie. Trouble was a grandson of Bear Path Gunner. I hunted them on everything that would climb a tree: coons, fishers, bears, and bobcats. When the bears would go in for the winter, I would road those two in the headlights. When they left the road they would tree a coon, fisher, or bobcat. I also hunted them on fresh snow in the daytime. I caught more game with the Plott dogs than any other hound.”  

Piontek remembers a hunt with Buck the Walker that he described as one of the many times the dog impressed him. “Buck was the best white Plott I ever had my hands on,” he recalled with a laugh. “He had it all. One of the many times he impressed me was when I had a split chase. Buck was treed solo, south of the town of Laona on the west side of Highway 32 behind Pete Kelvilis's firewood business. I left him treed there for eight hours. We found the rest of the hounds treed hours later, way to the west of town. I came back and walked into Buck. He was treeing as hard as he was when I had driven away from him that morning.”  

Piontek had a Plott female named Rose that for several years formed an awesome team with Buck. He said, “Buck was about equal with the best in the first five hours of a race. But then, watch out! On a running bear, he would give you another three or four hours when everything else was dropping out—too tired to run any more.” 

Unfortunately, as is the case with many of the good ones, Buck didn’t live a long life. He was killed by a bear, and Piontek’s words are all too common among houndsmen losing a good hound: “that one hurt.” As a tribute to his exceptional hound, a hound that inspired him to stray from his beloved Plotts, Piontek said, “I haven’t had my hands on a hound of that caliber since.”

To me, writing the life stories of legendary bear dogs is akin to writing the biographies of great men and women of history. These dogs distinguish themselves amongst their peers and with their owners by their heart, heroism, and phenomenal hunting abilities. Piontek and Crawford’s Buck certainly checked all the boxes ascribed to truly legendary hounds. I’m honored to bring the story of Buck and his fellow bear hounds to these pages.