Courtesy photo: Bears weighing nearly 500 pounds aren’t common in West Virginia, and when Chelsea Mullins of Bomont downed one with a 252-yard shot in early December, it created quite a stir. The bear weighed 489.6 pounds and measured 7 feet from nose to tail.
By: John McCoy, Staff Writer | Posted: Jan. 13, 2018 | Source: WV Gazette-Mail
You never know what you might encounter while deer hunting.
For Chelsea Mullins, it happened to be the biggest bear she, or any of her friends, had ever seen. And make no mistake, they’d seen a bunch of them.
“I’m an experienced bear hunter,” said Mullins, a 22-year-old dental assistant from the Clay County town of Bomont. “I’ve now killed three, and I’ve been along on a lot of hunts.”
All of those hunts, however, were with hounds that treed the bears so they could be shot. The bear Mullins killed on Dec. 2 was different.
“We couldn’t use hounds for this hunt because it was during [West Virginia’s firearm season for buck deer],” she explained.
In some of West Virginia’s counties, it’s legal to hunt bears during the buck season, but not with the help of dogs. Truth be told, Mullins and her boyfriend, Dustin Holcomb, weren’t even thinking about bears. They had planned to spend the final day of the 2017 buck season roaming the hills of northwestern Nicholas County in search of a nice whitetail.
Those plans changed at about 9 a.m., when they spotted something black moving across a distant hillside.
“When we spotted it, it looked like a big black dot,” Mullins said. “It was a long way away, and it didn’t notice us. We watched it through binoculars for about 35 minutes.”
As they watched, Mullins and Holcomb tried to accurately assess the bear’s size.
“Both the bears I’d shot before weighed less than 300 pounds,” she said. “If I was going to kill another one, I wanted it to be at least 300.”
The more they watched, the more Holcomb became convinced the bear was bigger than that. They ultimately decided to make a noise that would cause the bear to turn so Mullins could better gauge its size.
Mullins found a solid rest for her 7mm Magnum and started watching the bear through the rifle’s scope.
“When I was ready, Dustin threw a log over the hill into a pile of rocks,” she said. “The bear turned broadside to me. Through the scope, its chest looked as big as a truck hood. I knew instantly that I wanted to take the shot. Dustin didn’t say anything else because he didn’t want me to get shook up.”
Mullins squeezed the trigger and touched off the round. The 252-yard shot struck the bear squarely behind the shoulder. The animal ran just 20 yards before it went down.
Locating the fallen bear wasn’t difficult; getting it out of the woods turned out to be a royal pain.
“It took four people to load it onto a side-by-side,” Mullins recalled. “The bear made the side-by-side so top-heavy that we couldn’t go out the way we came in. One of our buddies had some heavy-duty scales, and we took the bear to his place to weigh it. It weighed 489.6 pounds. Dustin measured it at 7 feet from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail.”
The bear’s pelt is now at a taxidermist’s.
“I’m having a standing, full-body mount done,” Mullins said. “And I can’t wait to get the skull scored.”
Mullins hopes the skull’s combined length and width turns out to be 20 inches or greater. If it is, her bear will make the Boone & Crockett Club’s big-game trophy registry.
“I’d love for that to happen, because a 450-pound bear my dad killed years ago with a bow made the Pope & Young record book,” she said.
Before it can be measured, the skull has to dry for 60 days, so Mullins will have to wait until at least Jan. 31 before she can take it to an official Boone & Crockett scorer.
Mullins said she plans to continue bear hunting, mainly because she enjoys running the animals with hounds.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever shoot another one, though, because I probably won’t ever see another one this big,” she added. “I’m pretty much ruined.”
Reach John McCoy at johnmccoy@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1231 or follow @GazMailOutdoors on Twitter.
