Outdoor Personalities:

Victor Buka
Nothing gets in the way

By Dan Ladd

Elk hunters like to hear their quarry bugle; turkey hunters live to hear an old tom gobble and Victor Buka likes to hear his hounds when they are on the trail of a big black bear in the north Maine woods. “I enjoy listening to the dogs run,” says the Albion, Maine resident.  “I’ve shot one bear in my life and I don’ t care if I ever shoot another one.  I just love to hear the dogs and I like to see them cross the road if they do that.”

Buka has been chasing bears around the woods for over 40 years with Walkers and Plott hounds and often works with Denny Davis of Crooked Tree Lodge and Camps in Portage Lake, ME.  Maine’s bear hunting with hounds season usually begins in early September and runs through late October. This year it was September 10-October 26.

Both Walkers and Plotts are muscular, medium-sized dogs capable of running a bear all day long. “A lot can happen,” says Buka of a hound hunt for bear. “You may run the bear a half an hour and he’ll go up (a tree) and you may run the bear ten hours and it still don’t go up. You do not know.”

 Buka, Davis and others like to run the state limit of four dogs but many times one of those four will be a younger dog that they area trying to train. “Some of them are real fast,” he says of the Plotts. “They’re gritty, plenty of grit on a bear. They run, they tree (bears) and once the bear’s up the tree they’re still good and if the bear is on the ground they’ll fight ‘em on the ground.”

 Buka advises aspiring bear hound hunters to spend some time learning from more experienced hunters which is exactly what he did.  When he was a teenager he ran dogs with people who were the same age (64) that he is now. His experience has taught him that anything could happen when hunting bears with hounds. “I’ve been doing it for years and years, and I still don’t know everything there is to know about it,” he adds.

 Buka says the dogs don’t usually push the bear past the hunter. “They may bring him out past the road where a hunter can get a shot at him but usually he’s treed or he’s caught on the ground by the dogs. If they ran him a half an hour and bayed him up it wouldn’t take you long to get to him. But if they ran it ten or six hours and treed it, they may tree it close to a road and they may not.”

Occasionally the dogs get out of hearing range and out comes the tracking device. “You use the tracking unit with collars on the dogs and a unit that you carry with you,” he says. “You use it to beep them and to track them. Sometimes you will be so far way that you won’t even beep them. The range is 10-12 miles on flat land.  But, in the woods up here in Maine you’ll get four or five miles out of it.”

The fact that Buka gets out and pursues Maine black bears may grab you as being an amazing feat when you consider that he is disabled.  Many years ago Buka fell out of a tree and broke his back.  But that hasn’t stopped him from doing what he loves, which is hunting. “ I stay with the truck, I always have somebody else with me” he says of his hunting and guiding excursions.  “I still have my hands, I’m still able to drive and able to get in my truck. I also coyote hunt year-round. I have two coyote dogs.  We hunt as much as we can and I keep up with dogs with my tracking unit.  Them things (coyotes), I whack every one I see.  They’re really are hurting our deer herd.”

“You don’t go hunting just to kill the game, you go hunting to enjoy it,” says Buka of the sport he loves best. Buka feels that Maine’s regulations are friendly to people with disabilities and encourages others who have disabilities not to let then interfere with enjoying outdoor sports like hunting and fishing.  Although he did add that he does little fishing because he can’t get into the brook trout streams like he used to before he was hurt.  “As far as going into the lakes and sitting there all day to catch one or two fish; that wasn’t my thing,” he adds.

Maine’s bear-hounding season has wrapped up but it’s never too early to start planning for next year.  Who knows, if you go to Crooked Tree Lodge and Camps you might just get to ride along with Victor Buka. 

Dan Ladd Lives in West Fort Ann, New York. He is currently completing his first book on hunting public land in the Adirondacks.