For Tony Mosley, the majority of his life has been one big adventure. This is meant quite literally, as the avid huntsman has traveled the world in search for all sorts of high-end game.

The Concord native, 82, first learned to hunt small animals like rabbits and squirrels in the Uwharrie Mountains with his cousin when he was a kid, but transitioned to hunting deer as part of an archery club at Concord High.

“I’ve always just been drawn to it,” Mosley said about hunting.

His first big-time trip was to Wyoming in 1962, where he killed a mule deer — the first of many mounted animals hanging in his game room. In addition to his love for the hunt, Mosley also largely taught himself taxidermy, which is the art of preserving an animal’s body by mounting or stuffing.

“Once I got my toes in,” he said after his first Wyoming trip, “it was just full steam ahead.”

Mosley passion for hunting has taken him to, among other places, Alaska, each of the ten provinces in Canada, Russia and Africa.

After he took his son Todd caribou hunting in Quebec province, Mosley got connected with an individual who could help coordinate a trip to hunt brown bears in Siberia.

Mosley encountered quite the rigmarole when it came to logistics: He flew from Atlanta to Moscow, then traveled across several time zones to the Russian town of Magadan, before flying in an old Army helicopter about five hours north to Siberia.

It was there, amid several feet of snow, that Mosley, utilizing a 7mm Remington Magnum, snagged one of his biggest kills of his career: a roughly 1,000 pound brown bear.

He first spotted the bear about 300 yards away. “That’s a good bear if you can hit him,” Mosley recalls one of the local guides telling him. He fired the first shot and the bear rolled over and threw an arm up. “I said ‘I believe I broke that boy’s shoulder,’” Mosley recalled.

The bear got up and required two additional shots, with the third bullet striking his neck. Mosley ultimately stuffed the bear, which is arguably the most prominent display of his roughly two dozen animals in his game room.

Besides his trip to Siberia, Mosley has hunted moose in Alaska; warthogs, oryx, zebras, waterbucks and blue wildebeests in southern Africa, about five hours north of Johannesburg; and black bears in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.

He also spent more than a decade traveling to a private farm in Kansas, where Mosley hunted smaller game such as pheasants and turkeys.

“They’re all adventures,” Mosley said.

Most of the animals that were killed were then used as food sources, in keeping with proper hunting ethics. “You can’t shoot something and throw it away,” Mosley said.

As with any exploit comes some dangerous moments: Mosley recalls two separate occasions in Canada where bears climbed trees and got to within a few feet of where he was perched. Staying calm, Mosley quietly told the bears to leave and they did.

“The worst thing that you want to do is panic,” he said.

For Mosley, the actual killings are largely anticlimactic, as he is usually put in a position, with his skill, to succeed. He most enjoys the opportunities to travel to far-flung places, spend time outdoors and learn about the behaviors and movements of the targeted animals.

“If you go to the woods and come back in one piece, it’s never a failure,” Mosley said with a chuckle.