Gary Martin is a man on a mission. The mission is two-fold: to produce elite bear hounds and to use them to find the mammoth black bears of the eastern Carolina and Virginia coasts (many weighing more than 600 lbs). The hounds must be adept at trailing in some of the thickest terrain on the planet and at bringing the bruins to justice, as legendary bear hounds do best. Lately, the bears have been settling the score as evidenced by the numbers of top hounds that have met their waterloo when the big bears fight back. One such hound was the legendary Adolf. 

I met Martin around 2005 when I was living and working in Raleigh, North Carolina for the American Kennel Club. Martin was looking for Plott puppies upon which to build a pack of Plott bear dogs. Over time, I was able to deliver pups from breeders in Wisconsin and West Virginia as a result of my travels. When I approached him about doing this article, we talked about that. I had heard that those pups really didn’t make the grade. 

He partially disagreed saying, “Yes, I still have a female here out of the West Virginia stock of your dad’s. She is a super dog. She’s been beat up so much she will not come into heat. She came from Matt Mewshaw, you know him, from West Virginia. Matt is having the same trouble I am in getting dogs injured to the point that it has done something to their heat cycles.”  

I asked him if they go back to the Bear Pen hounds through Evan Workman’s old Drum dog and he confirmed that they do. Drum was sired by the Bear Pen Rio Grande Roper dog that I had. “I had another female named Molly,” Martin said, “that I would put up against anybody’s dog. We had a nice thing going, but it ran us right into the ground. Matt has some semen stored, but the problem right now is with the females.” 

Martin operates his Panther Swamp Plott Kennel from his farm in Conway, North Carolina—named after the swamp that runs behind his house. Conway is northeast of Rocky Mount, North Carolina near the Virginia line, about 45 minutes from the busy Interstate 95 corridor. “We raise peanuts, cotton, corn, soybeans, and wheat,” he says. “I’m 64 and I’ve been farming my entire life. I took the farm over when my dad retired. We raised tobacco, but we got out of that and really just got back into peanuts. Between trying to train dogs, hunting, and farming, I don’t have time for anything else.” 

I asked Martin how he got his start in hunting bears with hounds. He replied, “In 2002, a man by the name of Buster Yoker told me that he found bear tracks on some of my land. I told him I didn’t have any bears. He disagreed, so I told him that we should go hunting. He had a Plott dog named Bell. I had never seen a dog with a nose like that. If there was a track three days old, she knew that bear had been there. I killed a bear weighing 660 lbs, one of the five total bears we killed. I wasn’t into bear hunting then and I hadn’t been looking for bear tracks. Nobody was seeing them either, but we had milo and peanut fields and the bears had congregated around those fields. Through hunting with him, I saw that the dogs didn’t go very far distance-wise. I said, ‘This is what I want to do. I can enjoy this. The dogs don’t go all over the country.’” 

I asked Martin if the cold-nosed hound that Yoker had was a Plott. “Yes, sir,” he said, “it was a Plott. My line of dogs came out of Wisconsin. Buster Yoker didn’t have the papers but he told me what the dog was out of. Let me tell you how lucky it was that I met up with these dogs. I met them through Matt Mewshaw. Karl Seilenbinder brought a female over and bred it to Matt’s dog. Matt asked me if I was interested in a pup and I said no. I didn’t know anything about the pup. I asked him what line it was out of and he gave me Karl’s number. When I heard Karl’s response, I said, ‘Gosh, this is the same line the Bell dog was out of.’ He asked, ‘What Bell dog?’ And I said, ‘The one Buster Yoker had.’ He said, ‘Buddy, I trained that dog.’ So that led me right back to where those dogs came from. Let me tell you, it led me to one great line of trail dogs.”  

Unfortunately, Martin has seen a string of bad luck with his dogs lately. “I’ve had five dogs get killed, and I’m talking about five topnotch bear dogs. It would have put most guys out of business.” Bear hunters know you can be out of business in a very short span of time and Martin is no exception. 

I asked Martin why cold trailing was such an important trait in his dogs? I told him that some guys believe big and strong dogs that are rough with other dogs make good bear dogs. But Martin has a different idea. 

“Here, if you don’t have trail dogs you won’t find bears,” he said. “These bears will travel great distances to feed. The big bears I’ve been killing are being killed right over the line in Virginia. They will travel two or three miles from a cutover to feed. If you don’t have dogs that will smell that track where he’s walked the night before, you aren’t going to find him. I train my dogs in a rabbit pen as puppies, and that makes them track minded. Maybe they are too track-minded for some people, but I tell them that if I can’t find it, we ain't running it. If we can find him, we can get after him.” 

I asked Martin to explain what method he uses to strike the bear. “We do a lot of walking. You can’t bait in Virginia, but we can in North Carolina. We free cast the dogs and walk where guys tell me they have seen bears. That’s why Adolf was so strong. When we put him on the ground, he wasn’t like most Plotts; he had that big, heavy mouth that some Plotts don’t have and we could pack dogs to him.” 

Panther Swamp Adolf was born on January 20, 2000. He would have been five years old in 2005. Martin reflected on his hound, “For me they come into their own between five and six. That’s when their potential is as high as it gets and that’s when the bears kill them here. Adolf was as ???rank as anything you have ever seen on a bear. The meaner the bear was, the better. No bear was going to run him out. He lived for the bear to get after him. That’s when he was most potent and that’s why he is dead today. 

“On one hunt, he locked onto a bear that weighed 250 lbs. That bear came down the tree and Adolf jumped up and knocked the bear off the side. There were only four dogs there. They fought at the bottom of the tree until the bear had to go back up. When he started back up the tree, Adolf latched onto him and it dragged Adolf 20 feet up the tree. We just knew he was going to die and I said, ‘I want to try to catch him!’ Chad Hoggard was there and he told me to stay out of the way or I’d be killed. Adolf fell from that tree, but luckily he fell right on his back legs like a spring and jumped back up on the tree and started treeing. It didn’t even knock the air out of him. I don’t know why it didn’t kill him.” 

Adolf came out of Belott’s Reggie, a Plott owned by Tyler Belott of Wisconsin. His mother was Coney River Elin—she belonged to Martin and was one of the females he bought from Karl Seilenbinder. She was older and Martin had to take her to the vet for a c-section. “I lost one of the pups that was delivered naturally, so we took her into the vet to do the c-section at 3:30 in the morning,” he said. “We were able to save six of them. The guy with the male wanted two males. I ended up keeping two of them and both of them ended up being killed by bears. The other two that went to Wisconsin were killed by bears as well. There wasn’t a cull in the litter.” 

He continued, “Some people have a hard time believing how this line breeding works. I’m just proof of it. We probably raised five litters and haven’t had to cull any of them. It’s been hard for me to believe it. We are steadily producing trail dogs. People are calling me, but I don’t sell dogs. People say they’re magical and I tell them there’s nothing magical about them. We hunt these dogs. I have a good place to hunt and some people don’t have that. I may hunt 10 different clubs and we may never go back to some of them twice so the bear population stays stronger.”   

When Adolf was four months old in the rabbit pen, Martin could already see what he was. The pen is two acres and he puts pups in one at a time. “I knew he was going to trail by the way he tracked from the start. I don’t like to put them on bears too young. Once they are 10 or 11 months old, they can withstand the hitting and beating and they get over it, but you take one that’s seven or eight months old and it can mess them up,” he said, speaking more about the psychological effects more than the physical. 

Adolf was a 65-pound brown-brindle Plott. He had a heavy mouth with a voice that carried. When he bellowed, you could hear him all over the country. He was, as hound people say, a ‘beautiful tree dog’. “He wasn’t wild at the tree. He would scotch right up on the tree and was a slobber-mouth tree dog,” Martin remembered. Some dogs generate a lot of saliva or foam when they bark incessantly at the tree. 

By Martin’s count, Adolf had 75 or more kills to his credit. “He would find them, run them down, and many times was the only dog there. He didn’t have to have another dog with him. He was young when he got on his first bear and he had other young dogs with him. Anytime he had a bear on the ground, it seemed that he had the bear doing just what he wanted it to do. He loved the bears that would come out of the bay after him. It makes me sick to know that he’s gone,” lamented Martin. 

The day Adolf died, Martin recalls, “It was in Carolina. The bear had walked in at 2:30 that night. I had a picture of him on the camera. I turned two dogs loose with Adolf. They went out the first time and came back. The bear had gone out and come back the same way, verified by the camera. They went out the second time and this time they found the bear. That thing moved about 500 yards into the thickest part of the woods. I turned a little dog loose I called Tiny, which was out of Adolf and Cassie and another dog. 

“Right away, the bear broke her down and I had to go in and get her. It didn’t kill her, she’s healed now, but it did kill three dogs that day, including two good females within 300 yards. It happened in a thick reed bed and the dogs just couldn’t get away. He had bit the other dogs through the back. Adolf was chewed all underneath. He was there when the bear was killed, but then he laid down completely. The whole thing lasted about 35 minutes. Adolf died the next day. He had never been hurt that badly before, but he had a lot of scars. He was probably busted up inside.” 

As is often the case with hunters, Martin had intended to have semen drawn from him at the end of the season. But he waited too long, an important matter for hunters possessed of great dogs to consider. “I saved semen off the Oliver dog and will breed it to a female out of Adolf. I may have to have a couple of litters,” Martin stated. He understands the risks it takes, but he refuses to be beaten at his bear fighting game. He will not give up on his mission.