a few days, the hunter arrives to finish off the immobilised animal. Calling It is possible to attract bears by calling, imitating the sound of injured prey. Bears seem to have very short attention spans and if they are responding to a call and the sound stops, generally the bear will cease following the sound. Two callers are often better than one when calling bear as they can keep up continuous calling for longer periods of time. Bears can hear a call for distances up to a mile and often will take their time in responding. Hunting dogs In his book Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches, Theodore Roosevelt wrote that though small terriers could be used against bears, they usually only worked against bears which had never had the experience of being hunted before. The terriers would irritate and distract the bear with their yapping as the hunter creeped unnoticed. However, once the bear would notice the hunter, it would immediately ignore the dogs and retreat. He did however mention big half-breed hounds sometimes used in the Alleghanies of West Virginia, which were trained not merely to nip a bear, but to grip the grizzly by the hock as it ran. A pack of such dogs, trained to dash straight at the head and hold on like a vice, though unable to kill the bear, would hold it in place long enough for the hunter to finish it. However, bears were dangerous quarry for the dogs to tackle, and pack losses were not uncommon. Though a large number of dogs could kill sick or very young bears, they could not do so with healthy adults. Today, it is more common for hunters to use dogs to track a bear. Often riding in the back of a truck to catch a scent, the dog will start to bark when there is a track. Dogs will then follow the track showing the way for the hunters. Modern bear hunters use hounds of mixed breeding to tree bears. Bear dogs used to track and tree American black bears in Michigan are typically cross-bred hounds, often with GPS tracking collars on one or more dogs to help locate the pack in the dense forest. Poison In the expansion era of the American west, poison was usually only practiced by the owners of cattle or sheep who had suffered losses from bears, though this