The Second Wild Hog I Ever Killed

 

I'm skipping the story of my first wild hog kill because, in more or less one sentence it would be: I suddenly saw a pig running straight at me out of the brush, I snapped my rifle up, shot him in the head and viola, I was a successful hog hunter!

 

However, that second hog… It was early spring 1993 and not many people knew much about hunting hogs. My buddy Robert and I had determined that we would find the destructive ghosts that had begun to appear at our west Texas lease. Most of the guys refused to even believe pigs were that far west, even though they saw the signs and had heard of the sightings. We knew our mission! 

We set out hunting the edge of the mesa. Robert and I liked hunting this way because we had a commanding view of the brush and boulder strewn sides of the ragged canyons of the mesa, as well as the valleys below. Our basic hunting method was just to walk, watch and listen for pigs in the brush below us. We had confidence in this method due to the fact that we were the only successful hog hunters on our lease!

 

It was a warm February afternoon and we were fighting the cactus, loose rocks and large crevasses at the edge of the cliffs when we heard a sound. We both froze and Robert spotted the pig first. We shouldered our rifles and I waited for him to shoot the black pig, which was only about 80yd away but easily 100ft below us, and partially obscured by brush! 

 

As I waited, I hoped to spot another pig in time to shoot as close to the same time as Robert did. We had already learned that you rarely saw pigs by themselves, but when we had seen them, it was only for brief moments. If I could just see one before he shot and they all started running... We had tried the 'shoot on three' method before, and hopefully this time would work a little better! The boom of Robert’s 7mm magnum at about 6' away both made me jump and reminded me that my time was up to spot any unwary pigs! As I became aware of the ringing in my ears I also saw the side of the mesa below us erupt in pigs of all sizes and colors running all directions! I spotted a large calico that paused briefly on a knoll, which was all the time I needed to bring my 7mag to bear, and at the shot it reared up on its hind legs, did a little hop, and then ran downhill into the thick brush!

 

The sounds of echoing gunfire and pigs running through brush faded, and we high-fived each other and recounted how many times we shot, how many pigs we saw, and how many we hit. When I told Robert I only shot one hog he looked at me funny and told me I really needed to improve my speed and ability to hit multiple targets. Fair enough, but my pig was huge! 'Yeah right, you've only ever shot one-it's probably a runt!' was his response. 

 

It was right at dusk and about a 45 minute walk back to the truck, so he volunteered to stay, find the pigs and start cleaning them. I figured he had it easy since we could see his pig lying right where we first saw it, and surely mine wasn't far away. We only had one knife, so I gave it to him, with the sheath, and my flashlight since he had none. He handed me his rifle and grinned as he drew his .45, and we parted ways.

 

Making it back to the truck was a little harder and took a little longer than I thought, and I thought I heard faint gunshots occasionally but didn't think much of it. I could already hear the griping about 'what took so long' etc. so I fired up the truck and lit out for the edge of the mesa. 

 

As I rolled up to the edge I was expecting to see a flashing light, Robert standing there, or hear some hollering-'over here', anything other than the absolute nothing that my headlights shone out into ahead of me. I killed the truck and got out with a little worry starting to creep in. 

 

Finally I could hear a faint whistle! Suddenly I got even more worried than before-Robert could let out an ear-splitting whistle, how far down must he BE? I honked the horn and faintly heard something about 'get the <universal adjective> down here...ammo...rope...light!'. Remembering the thick brush cloaking the hillside, I opted to leave my jacket, even though it was cooling down rapidly, put on an extra shirt, strapped on my .44, slung the rope over my shoulder, grabbed two extra flashlights and started picking my way down the cliff face in the dark. After 10 minutes or so I lost track of how many cacti I ran into, how many briars I got hung up in, and how many times I fell in the dark. My only focus was get down to my buddy who had begun yelling every few minutes that I needed to hurry because the pigs were all around him!

 

I finally reached Robert, sliding downhill about 20 yards for the final approach. As I shined the light on him I got quite a shock! He was covered in blood, had his .45 in one hand with the slide locked back (empty mag), knife in the other, cigarette dangling from his mouth and a steady torrent of expletives coming almost faster than I could process! ‘These pigs are all around us and won’t leave! I got down here and they were running all around me and I had to use my pistol to stop ‘em!’. He finally stopped talking, held his hand up, and we both stood there listening. Sure enough, you could hear pigs not far away! We finally determined that they probably weren’t going to bother us and I asked if he had found my pig. ‘Yeah I found that huge b**** over there! Could you have picked something bigger to kill, maybe a hippo?’ I shined the light and there was my calico pig, looking nothing short of gigantic. I said ‘let’s drag her up’, and he said ‘oh sure, go ahead, first I want to see you try to even move her!’ Well ok. What ensued was a lesson in dead weight and just how dense and hard to manage a dead pig can be! He had already gutted the huge sow and still it seemed like we were trying to move the proverbial ‘immoveable object’.

 

Finally we decided to cut the pig in half. We had determined that this pig MUST be seen by the other hunters in camp because none of them would believe it if we told them how big it was. I tied the rope to the front half, headed back uphill, and quickly discovered we needed about twice as much rope! We drug, pushed, and pulled half a pig uphill as far as we could, would take a break, then start over again. Twice we had to start completely over after we lost control and everything, including us, tumbled back down the hill to the small flat spot that seemed like it might just end up becoming our final resting place.

Finally, after many setbacks, we ended up with both halves of the sow at the top and in the truck! We sat for probably 30 minutes in total darkness, without saying a word, just recovering. We both were full of cactus, bruises, totally soaked with sweat, streaked with red west Texas dirt, and generally looked ready for the grave. We certainly felt that way!

 

We rattled back into camp around 2am and didn’t even clean up-just went straight to bed. Around sunup we were woken up by thunderous pounding on the camper door! We both jumped up, assuming something was wrong, went outside, and were greeted by almost a dozen guys, some friends on the lease and several paid hunters that had arrived the night before to hunt pigs over the weekend.

 

As we recounted the story of what happened, the painful realization started to sink in… All those paid hunters had decided they didn’t want to hunt with anybody else but us-and they were ready to go-right then!