The black bear that Chad Sharp of Bella Vista shot with his bow was so big it took a winch, a four-wheeler and a bunch of his buddies to muscle the 500-pound bruin on to a trailer.

The bear is so big it's the new Arkansas record black bear in the Pope & Young record book that recognizes qualifying big game killed with archery gear.

Sharp shot the bear in Crawford County on Oct. 1, 2010, but it wasn't until last month that it was certified as the state's top-scoring archery bear.

The day Sharp let his arrow fly, he was capturing his bear-hunting adventure on video. He attached a lighted nock on the arrow shaft so it would be easier to see the flight of the arrow on tape. Little did Sharp know that Pope & Young doesn't recognize game taken with lighted bow sights or arrow nocks. He found that out when his bear was scored by Rusty Johnson, an Arkansas Game & Fish Commission wildlife officer, who is a Pope & Young scorer.

A couple of months ago, Sharp said, Pope & Young removed the lighted nock rule and said Sharp's bear could be re-scored. He still has the skull of the bear, which is all Johnson needed on June 12 to measure its length and width for scoring. Sharp soon got his certificate and paperwork in the mail recognizing the bruin as the top Arkansas bear.

The black bear was believed to be 23 years old, Johnson wrote on the score sheet.

Hard Work Pays

The 43-year-old carpenter worked hard for his trophy, laying the groundwork years before he drew the bow. He's been hunting most of his life and got the bug to try bear hunting about seven years ago. He wanted a place to hunt on private land and heard that the area near Lake Fort Smith State Park was good for bears.

"I started going down the country roads and knocking on every door asking, 'Hey, would you let a guy do some bear hunting here?" No was always the answer, but Sharp kept at it. Finally, a landowner gave him permission to hunt on his property.

Now the real work began.

Baiting for black bears is legal on private land, but not on public land. Four weeks before the 2010 archery bear season opened on Oct. 1, Sharp set up a bait station. He got a 55-gallon barrel and chained it to a tree. Sharp filled it full of old donuts, all sorts of food scraps and old cooking grease.

He'd cut openings in the barrel so bears could reach inside and get the goodies.

Immediately, the neighborhood bears came to Sharp's bait barrel to eat. Every Saturday he'd drive from Bella Vista to refill the barrel and look at pictures of the visiting bears taken by his game camera.

Then, the bears quit coming. All but one, that is. The 500-pound bear Sharp would eventually arrow drove the smaller bears away. The big bruin claimed the bait station as his own. When he saw the photos, Sharp knew he'd have the chance to kill a huge, huge bear.

As the season neared, Sharp would check his game camera and see the big bear in pictures.

"That bear would eat so much, then he'd just lay there by the bait barrel," Sharp said.

It wasn't until opening day of archery bear season on Oct. 1, 2010, that Sharp saw the bear alive from his tree stand. When it ambled into view, Sharp couldn't believe his eyes. "I just thought, 'Oh my goodness'."

Seeing the bear come within 10 yards before he made the shot was almost dream-like, Sharp said. He didn't feel nervous when the moment of truth arrived and he drew his compound bow.

"My brain was freaking out. It was like, 'Is this real?'"

When the bear reached into the bait barrel, it gave Sharp the perfect shot opportunity just above and behind the bear's front leg, the same vitals area as a white-tailed deer.

Sharp's shot was pinpoint accurate. The bear walked 10 yards and fell dead.

Heavyweight Bruin

Moving the bear was like trying to move 500 pounds of blubber, Sharp recalled. He and some buddies eventually got the bear on a trailer hitched to Sharp's pickup. The bear was strapped to the trailer in plain view as Sharp headed north on Interstate 49 (I-540 back then) toward Greenland.

"We pulled into the truck stop at Greenland and I went in and asked the lady if I could weigh a bear on their scales," Sharp said. She gave Sharp a "now I've heard everything" look and said yes.

The bear was enough of a sight on the interstate that some motorists followed Sharp to the truck stop to get a better look at it.

By now, a crowd had gathered around the scales. Sharp weighed the bear twice. One weighing showed the bear to be 490 pounds. Another weighing showed 560. "So it's somewhere between the two," Sharp said.

That's huge for an Arkansas black bear. It impressed Brian McKinzie, Arkansas Game & Fish Commission regional enforcement supervisor, who got a look at it.

"I saw that bear after he got it. It was unbelievable," McKinzie said.

Unbelievable, but not unheard of. McKinzie said a 500-pound black bear was recently captured near Cane Hill in Washington County in a trap the landowner had set out for feral hogs.

There is a bear roaming around in Bella Vista, McKinzie said, although a smaller one. Another bear has been seen lately in the Decatur area.

There are bears in every Northwest Arkansas county, he said.

"There are always more bears than people think. Most of the time they're so secretive that people rarely see them," McKinzie said.

Female black bears in Arkansas rarely reach 300 pounds, but males can reach 400 pounds by the time they are seven years old, according to the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission website.

Bear hunting runs in the Sharp family. They camp during bear season at Lake Fort Smith State Park, which is close to Sharp's hunting area. His daughters, Tasha, 21, and Miranda, 19, have each killed bears with their bows. Sharp's wife, Tisha, comes along for the enjoyment of the trip, helping to cook and haul out game.

Sharp will be back in the woods next bear season. He might break his own record. The landowner says he's seen a bear on his place that's bigger than Sharp's Pope & Young bear.

Outdoors on 07/19/2014