Considering his recent run of good fortune, Phillip Mullinax of Travelers Rest may want to buy a lottery ticket or two.He killed his first-ever South Carolina black bear: a 335-pound bruin that ranked as the second-largest taken during the 2010 season.
“I was just in the right place at the right time,” Mullinax said. That’s the way it was with the elk, too. Hey, it’s about time. We had walked many a mountain hunting those things — it’s not like we hadn’t paid our dues.”
The bear was considerably easier.
Mullinax was hunting from a tree stand on a large tract of club-leased property in northern Greenville County on Oct. 22, the final day of the still-hunt season for bear. He and other club members had seen several bears hanging out in the area.
“We had seen a big bear a lot, and I said, ‘I’ll go try it,’” said Mullinax, a 53-year-old cabinet maker.
The hunt unfolded quickly. Mullinax climbed into his stand around 5:30; less than an hour-and-a-half later, he had his bear.
“I was watching some deer, and here he came, walking out of the woods and into one of our food plots,” Mullinax said. “After a few minutes, he evidently caught my scent, because he stopped eating and raised his head up. He never ran, but just started walking off — you could tell he knew it was time to leave. Two more steps and he would have been gone.”
Mullinax stopped the bear with a single 150-yard shot from his 30-06. He had no idea how large the bear was until he and a friend attempted to put it on the back of his truck.
“We finally just backed the truck up to a bank and drug him off into the back of the truck,” Mullinax said.
The bear had a unique white marking under its neck, “about the size of a basketball,” Mullinax said, and at 335 pounds was the largest of three killed in Greenville County during the 2-week bear season.
Mullinax’s bruin was the second-heaviest overall, trailing only a 362-pound bear killed by Roger Queen of Cullowhee, N.C., in Oconee County during the dog, aka party-hunt, season. The top Pickens County bear was a 255-pound female taken by Easley’s Jerry Couch during the party hunt.
A total of 35 bears were killed during the season, considerably fewer than last year’s record harvest of 92, but in-line with the average for the previous decade.
“It was a pretty good season despite some bad weather in the early part,” said Tammy Wactor, a wildlife biologist with the S.C. Department of Natural Resources. “We had horrible rain the first three days of the dog hunt. If we hadn’t had those days, the harvest would have been right on the average.”
Pickens County led the way with 18 bears killed, followed by Oconee County with 14 and Greenville with three. Twenty-five of the 35 bears were taken during the party hunt.
The harvest was almost identically balanced, with 18 boars and 17 sows taken, said Wactor, who added that 920 tags were sold in the first year of the bear-tag program and that 79 parties, including 846 hunters, registered for the party hunt.
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