While it didn’t end up being a state record, the 735-pound bear Tommy Sorie killed on December 11 in the Enfield area does stand as the largest killed in Halifax County to date.

“It is the largest bear ever in Halifax County,” Sorie said Wednesday. “It beat the other by 50-some pounds. Right now it stands as the eleventh largest ever killed in the state of North Carolina. It is the second largest bear killed in North Carolina this year.”

The story behind the record county kill is that it was done by a 74-year-old man who never considered himself a bear hunter.

Asked how many times he has been bear hunting, Sorie said, “Three times,” referring to the three weeks from when bear began showing up on a game camera. 

That was the first week. “We went again about a week after that and a few days after that was when I killed the bear. I’m really not a bear hunter and I don’t consider myself a bear hunter now. I had never really been bear hunting (until) we began getting all these pictures. I can remember when there weren’t any bears around here.”

Said Sorie: “It’s just something I said, that I would like to kill a bear. I don’t care about shooting another one. I don’t care if had been 500 pounds, 300 pounds or 900 pounds, which there is no such thing, I don’t care about shooting another one.”

Sorie has hunted about everything there is to hunt in the area — besides bear. “I used to quail hunt a lot. I used to hunt squirrels, even with squirrel dogs. I rabbit-hunted a lot. I’ve deer-hunted a lot. I’ve killed a lot of deer in my life.”

One of the things of which he is most proud is that the same .243 rifle that he’s had for 50 years — the same one he has used to kill his share of deer — was the one that took down the bear. “I’ve killed a lot of deer with that particular rifle I killed that bear with. I’ve had that rifle for probably 50 years. It’s always been good to me.”

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Sorie’s daughter tells the story of the hunt that serves as the family’s press release on how her father killed the behemoth bear.

When Harold Jordan of Harrellsville first saw the bear he thought the dogs had a black angus cow bayed in the wooded area off Highway 481 near Green Acres Road northeast of Enfield. Jordan fired a slug into the bear with his 20-gauge shotgun but it wasn’t over yet.

Sorie had been monitoring a cellular trail camera he had covering a peanut field harvested months before. 

A lifelong resident of the area, Sorie began seeing bears looking to glean peanuts on his camera. 

He and Tim Tedder of Kenly, along with Irvin Ayers who, like Jordan is from the Harrellsville area, dispatched hounds into the swampy area a week prior with no success. 

The morning of December 11 Sorie woke up to images of bears on his camera from just a few hours before. He mustered the other three men and quickly formed a plan.

About 9:30 a.m. Ayers set his hounds on bear tracks in the field, still a little muddy from the rain on December 10. 

The dogs trailed the scent for quite some time.

Tedder released his dogs on the other side of the beaver pond. 

After about 15 minutes his dogs picked up a scent and started to pick up their pace. 

The hunters sent out more hounds, 11 in all, and the dogs had something cornered in the woods as Jordan made the initial approach. 

Nobody expected to see the giant black bear. 

Once Jordan was sure it was not a cow, he fired. The bear appeared to be unphased and scrambled away through the woods.

The dogs were hot on the bear’s heels as he led the hunters about three quarters of a mile through swampy forest. 

About 40 yards from where Conoconnara Swamp crosses Green Acres Road, Sorie spotted the bear and fired several times with his Winchester 88 lever action rifle. 

It took several shots to finally bring the bear down. 

The hunters collected their hounds and approached the massive bear. 

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His daughter said a side by side ATV was brought in to drag the bear out of the swamp to the roadside. 

Dan Wilson, a local farmer, passed by and commented that the bear was the biggest one he had ever seen. 

He suggested they take the bear to Shield’s Fertilizer Company in Scotland Neck to have it weighed on certified scales. 

Men from the small crowd that had gathered chipped in and the bear was rolled, pushed, and dragged onto the trailer.

Since then, Sorie said, the bear was carried to a bear-hunting club down in the Colerain area near where Jordan and Ayers live. “They got it dressed out. I kept a ham. It is pretty good. It’s been a long time since I’ve eaten bear. I’ve had some made into sausage and bear burger with the onions and stuff mixed in with it.”

As far as a reaction, Sorie said he didn’t have time to savor the kill. “It happened so quick and all. No sooner than I killed the bear I had to leave and go to an appointment that I had canceled one time that day.”

But he said he is appreciative of the efforts of the small hunting party. “The other three guys are the ones that did all the huffing and puffing and grunting and straining to get the bear out of the woods.”