Nov 16, 2018 By Olivia Serdy for The 4 min read

Outdoorsmen hit Pennsylvania woods last weekend hoping to harvest a bear during an immensely successful four-day regular firearm season for black bear.

But one local 14-year-old hunter was home, reveling in the recent hunt of a lifetime.

Three weeks ago, Gage Brugger of Farmington bagged his first black bear with a 47-inch chest and an estimated live weight of 332 pounds.

The mountain area teen described the hunt as one he won’t soon forget.

“I was getting frustrated. I’d only saw two does all day, and they were looking around, never comfortable,” Brugger said, recalling the memorable evening in the hunting blind Nov. 3 in Elliottsville.

He was hunting that night with his dad and a family friend, Gary Spade. With less than 15 minutes of legal shooting light left, Brugger said he’d pretty much resigned himself to not seeing a bear during the last day of their bow season. The tide changes minutes later, though.

There was nothing in front of Brugger or in his peripheral vision. It wasn’t until he turned around that he saw the massive black bear lumbering towards them.

“It didn’t even look real. It was like a dream,” Brugger said, noting that the bear was a meer ten yards away. “Its belly was almost touching the ground, and it was just so big. It was unrealistic.”

Brugger said he froze in shock for what seemed like 15 seconds before he whipped around with his crossbow perched on a shooting stick, taking a shot at 6:38, with only minutes of daylight left to spare.

“I didn’t see it run off, I could just hear it,” Brugger said.

“I was shaking like a leaf for an hour,” he said with a laugh, admitting that he was smiling ear to ear the whole time.

Not long after, they started looking for blood or any sign of impact.

“When we started tracking it, it started seeming real. It didn’t dawn on me until then. It’s nothing like I’ve ever seen or shot before,” the teen said.

The crew called off the search until morning, not wanting to amble up on an injured, angry black bear in the dark.

After maybe three hours of sleep that night, thanks to an abundance of adrenaline and excitement, Brugger resumed the search with his family and Spade.

It wasn’t long, though, before they found the trail again, with Brugger’s brother Wade spotting the large black mass first. With the help of friends Jason and Wyatt Rishel, and Jeff and Kim Peters, they brought the massive harvest up out of the woods.

The morning was filled with handshakes and congratulations, everyone guessing what the female bear’s weight was while marveling at the meaty paws and yellowed teeth.

Brugger later met with a Pennsylvania Game Commission game warden to document the hunt and allow for the warden to collect data and a tooth, which will later be examined to help determine her age.

“It was just so big. It was so cool,” Brugger said a week later, still grinning as he recalled the hunt. He added that he plans to get a full bear mount.

An avid hunter, though, this isn’t his first harvest this year. He also shot a seven-point buck with a crossbow in late October, and a massive turkey during spring gobbler season — an unofficial “grand slam” for the 2018 calendar year, even if by PGC regulations, he doesn’t have a “grand slam” for the 2018-19 license year.

For other hunters who hit the woods during the past week, the PGC is already saying that harvest numbers were up substantially from 2017.

Already, the PGC is recording a first day harvest of 1,241 black bears — nearly double what it was last year.

“Last fall, bear hunters took a preliminary harvest of 659 bears on the Saturday opener, which became a record-low harvest for what is by far the best harvest day of the annual four-day bear season,” a report from the PGC said.

This year was a different story altogether.

“Although Winter Storm Avery might have impacted hunter travel to camp country and access to the more remote forested areas bears inhabit, hunters found a way to reach bears,” the report said. “This year’s first-day preliminary bear harvest positions the state for a bear harvest that could challenge for a Top-5 harvest year.”