Wild Hogs – sorry no pics
Monday I was working on a 130 acre tract in the boonies. It was my first day on the job and I took off to the back line expecting to see the fence and then figured to head East to the Southeast corner. I picked the one place where the old fence was down and there were no posts, so I completely missed it. I didn’t prepare any approximate search coordinates, so I was traipsing around half lost, until I was sure I’d gone too far. I turned around headed a slightly different way so that I might pick up the fence I knew I’d missed. I found a flagged line (which turned out to still be way too far South. There were signs of wild hogs everywhere, and it was very fresh. Sure enough, about a hundred yards away, I see a sow. Pretty big too. She’s making a lot of racket. I started whistling, then talking. She didn’t notice or didn’t care. I took a shot on a nail I found and figured as long as she stayed over there and I was over here and I could hear her, it didn’t matter.
After that, I was still pretty sure I was way in the wrong place, so I continued back North along a trail. I approached a pipeline clearing that crossed the trail perpendicularly. I could hear hogs about a hundred feet down the pipeline clearing. I could see through the trees that there was a large sow, a small boar and some piglets. I’ve seen Ol’ Yeller. I know how that goes. So not wanting to spook them, I made some noise. In the woolies, I try to always keep a sidearm handy. I made a loud hissing noise. They stopped and the piglets started moving around panicked. The sow and the boar looked my direction. I was still obscured by the trees. I didn’t step into the intersection of the clearings. The boar started running right toward me. I had that 357 in my hand in a hurry. Since I wasn’t on my subject property, I really, really didn’t want to start blasting unless I really, really had to.
He stopped in the trees looking my direction, then peeled off with the piglets and sow the other direction.
I bumped into the same herd (is it a herd of pigs?) that afternoon when I found the Southeast corner of my tract. They were further away, but the piglets were panicked again and they were running all through the bottom I was in. Sure made it hard to concentrate. I have seen pictures of what wild boars can do with those tusks, but I don’t know how real the danger is. I haven’t spent much time around wild hogs. I don’t know if most of those victims were doing something stupid to provoke it or if a hog will charge an unsuspecting person.
Back in the summer, I was locating a creek across a property I was subdividing. I kept hearing a popping noise that sounded like those Africans that click with their throats. I couldn’t quite place the noise as I’d never heard it before. I walked up on a dead hog in the creek (maybe a hundred pounds) so I knew they were in the area. I told a friend about it who hunts a lot and he told me it was a hog popping his jaws. That day I had forgotten to carry my sidearm. You can bet that I didn’t forget it the next time I was out there.
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