CHERRY TWP — After decades of trying, Robert Pisor saw the bear he had dreamed about bagging.

Only he couldn’t.

“I was sitting in my truck eating a sandwich at the time,” the 74-year-old Hilliards resident said. “I wasn’t ready. That thing probably weighed 300 pounds if more.

“I still thought this might be my year. I saw a coyote on my way home the night before. I got a deer during bow and arrow season.”

Pisor has been an avid hunter for 62 years, starting out as a 12-year-old with his father. He’s been hunting bear for close to 40 years.

For more than 20 years, he’s gone bear hunting annually with good friend Dan Farren and a group of 25 hunters or more.

“Out of all of us, I was the only one never to get a bear,” he said. “I told my wife just recently, I need to get one before I die.”

Only a handful of the group headed into the woods this year. Pisor can only go so far — he had a hip replacement done six years ago and has a disability permit to hunt from his truck.

“When Bob was healthier, he could really go,” Farren said. “He thrived on hunting season.”

But the bear always eluded him. Until this year.

After downing that sandwich, Pisor got another chance.

“Dan had just left me about a half-hour earlier to go deeper into the woods,” Pisor said. “I saw a bear about 75 yards away. It wasn’t the one I saw before. This one weighed 196 pounds.”

That was good enough for Pisor, who had refused to shoot at three bear cubs four years earlier when he easily could have gotten one.

“I refuse to shoot a cub. No way,” he said.

When he lined this bear up with his scope, he knew his drought was over.

“When Bob got that bear, I was maybe 700 yards away,” Farren said. “I had just talked to him on the radio when I heard the shot.

“I heard somebody yelling, ‘I got one down! I got one down!’ Bob kept yelling at me to get back over there. He didn’t stop yelling until I got to him. That guy was so excited. He deserved it.”

All Pisor wanted was to bag a bear. He didn’t want to keep it.

Farren didn’t want it, so he gave it to a young hunter who happened along to help load the bear on to his truck.

“The guy is a taxidermist in his dad’s basement,” Pisor said. “He offered to pay for it , but I said no. I didn’t want the bear skin or a mount or anything. I hunt for the pure sport of it.

“I told the guy to just follow me to the check station and I’d give it to him. A picture of the bear was good enough for me.”

Pisor has hunted small game and deer all his life, bagging plenty of both. He doesn’t keep the deer he kills, either.

“We stopped eating venison years ago,” he said.

He’s shot an antelope in Wyoming. He shot his first bear about a mile from his house, just off Pleasant Valley Road, near Moniteau High School.

“Persistence pays off,” Farren said. “That guy never gave up.”