One Huge Bear
Ray Pruss sat quietly watching a section of Muthersbaugh Swamp on the second day of bear season last year. The multitude of saplings and small trees allowed very little visual penetration into the swamp, so he spent most of his time watching the raised logging road that traversed the wetland on the Penn State Experimental Forest.
He was watching for bears and waiting for his friend Jesse Darlington to appear. Pruss was also thinking about his brother Ted, who had harvested a 250-pound bear from the same spot just the day before. Could lightning strike twice in the same spot, Pruss wondered?
At about 8:45, Pruss noticed a few small birds fly swiftly across the old road and fully expected to see his hunting buddy Darlington step out onto the road near that same spot. As every good hunter knows, the thought that a bear might have disturbed those birds also crossed Pruss’ mind, so he readied himself for a shot.
Just then the biggest bear that Pruss could imagine stepped out onto the logging road. The bear turned his head, looking towards the hunter, but kept walking, as Pruss hurried to find his target through his 6X scope. The crosshairs centered on the massive black chest just as the bear was entering the brush on the other side of the old road. The .30-06 Remington Gamemaster roared as the bruin disappeared into the undergrowth about 110 yards away.
Darlington was close enough to hear Pruss’ shot and quickly arrived at the scene. “Did you shoot at a bear? How big was it?”
An excited Pruss remembers replying, “A thousand pounds!”
Darlington and Pruss began tracking the bear. As Ray was relating the story to me, I wondered how a Volkswagen-sized bear could leave a trail that difficult to follow. However, according to Pruss there wasn’t much of a blood trail and the cover was thick. After 30 minutes of tracking and losing and relocating the trail several times, they finally found the big bear. Pruss had made a heart shot, and it had traveled only about 60 yards.
A local farmer helped them remove the bear from the swamp and later, at the Pennsylvania Game Commission check station, Pruss learned that his bear had an estimated live weight of 634 pounds. That made it the fifth heaviest bear harvested in 2001. Its age was later determined to be four years and ten months, based on a tooth extracted from the bear’s lower jaw.
While the odds of connecting with a Keystone bruin are decidedly better than winning the Powerball lottery, they still are pretty meager. Each season for the past several years, approximately 2900 Pennsylvania bears were harvested by just over 110,000 hunters. Although still slight, the odds are considerably improved from what they used to be.
It should be no surprise to learn that the vast majority of Pennsylvania hunters spend their entire hunting career without even seeing a legal bear. That’s why I knew Pruss was a special hunter when we met in his Julian home last month. Not only had he scored with what anyone would call the bear of a lifetime, he has also harvested three other bears, including a 453-pounder, during the past ten years.
Pruss attributes his success to “preseason planning and an incredible amount of luck.” He said, “I was lucky to see the bear, lucky to hit it at that range, and we were lucky to find him.”
What’s my take on his success? For starters, he has many outdoor contacts in a three or four county area, and he is always asking about how many bears people are seeing in different areas. Second, he spends a good bit of time in the woods. (His wife, with a smile on her face, calls this “an obsession.”) He is also an alert hunter and a good rifle shot. And finally, Lady Luck has a little to do with all hunting, just not as big a part as some might reason.
Boone&Crockett Bear
Ten or so large bears being harvested each season is becoming the norm in Pennsylvania. In 2000, one harvested bear weighed more than Pruss’ bear. In 2001, four were heavier, and in the season just completed, five more bears earned estimated live weights greater than Pruss’ 634-pound bruin. The heaviest bear taken in 2002 was 761 pounds.
Fortunately for Pruss, trophy bears are determined by skull size rather than weight. After the required 60-day drying period, Pruss had his bear skull measured by an official Boone & Crockett Club scorer. While scoring deer antlers is rather complicated with dozens of different measurements, bear scoring is very straight forward.
Just two measurements are taken. The skull, with its lower jaw removed, is placed on a flat level surface and measured (straight line distance, not following the contour) from front to back and from side to side at its widest point. Measurements are taken to the nearest 1/16 of an inch and the two added together.
Pruss’ monster Huntingdon County bear totaled 22 and 9/16. According to Pruss, that official score makes it the fourth largest bear ever harvested in Pennsylvania and ties it for the eighth largest black bear in the world.
With the addition of all of the more recent bears, exactly where Pruss’ bear will place when PA again tallies its records in several years is anybody’s guess. Had Pruss’ bear been shot in 1988, it would have topped the number one bear at the time. Since 1990, the top of the PA bear records have been changing with each Game Commission official scoring session.
The2002 Season
And how did Pruss do this bear season? He was only able to get away from his job as a Penn State University safety officer for the first two days of the season this November. He spent those two days in the woods and, like most hunters, he saw no bears. As luck would have it, while Pruss was at work on the third and final day of the season, another member of his hunting party used the fresh snow to locate and shoot a bear.
While Pruss didn’t score in 2002, I’d bet money that he will get “lucky” again during a future bear season. With four Pennsylvania bears to his credit and a living room wall displaying some impressive whitetail trophies – many archery kills – something tells me that there is just a bit more involved to the Pruss story than luck. Whether he’s scoring or not, rest assured that a Pruss hunt is always successful because, as he told me, “I just like to be in the woods.”
Mark Nale can be reached at MarkAngler@aol.com
