Age: 46

Education: University of Minnesota-Morris

Experience: Biology teacher in Stillwater for 18 years; taught in Anoka-Hennepin district for three years before that.

Outdoor hobbies: Weaver trains wirehaired pointer dogs and falcons, using them together to hunt pheasants. He also runs a youth archery program, hunts bears in northern Minnesota and is breeding falcons through a 10-year project funded by a state grant designed to teach students how an endangered species can be brought back.

Bear-hunting tales: Last fall was Weaver's fourth hunting bears, and the first time he was successful. The first two years, he only got pictures of bears; in the third, "I shot at one and missed, embarrassingly. That was the end of that season."

The biggest thing that surprised Weaver about bear hunting, he said, was how instinctive the animals are. "In terms of fair chase, it didn't sound very exciting [at first]," he said. "You operate a bait station and try to get them habituated. But they're far more wary and far more difficult than white-tailed deer to hunt.

"Their powers of smell are just phenomenal. They're under the gun, because after six months of not eating, they've got to put on a ton of weight in the months they're around. It's in their best interest to find a good food supply. They can smell the food, and they can smell things like humans. A lot of guys have seen a bear 200 yards away, looking right at them. The successful bear hunters become fanatical about smell. The day of a hunt, they don't touch their dogs or gas up their cars."

BEN GOESSLING