The Night Hunt

submitted by Mike

9/4/03

My uncle Kevin was passing through town on business and had a night to spare, so we went out to Terry Haun's place near Victoria for a night of hog hunting . After we signed in at about 9pm, we walked around a bit to check out one of the three areas we planned to hunt. The first area didn't look like it had been hit by any hogs recently, so we were going to drive to our second spot across the creek. When we got to the low water crossing, it was flooded. I remembered the last time I was there it was paved, so I figured I'd just wade out there to see if I could make it across in the Jeep before I tried to drive it. It turned out that the road got washed out so about halfway out I stepped off the edge into shoulder-deep water. I got more than I bargained for... But we didn't let that slow us down--I just shook the water out of my Glock and then we moved on to the third area.

We started walking back to one of the feeders and a few hundred yards out we began to hear the hogs. It was exciting because we could hear them very clearly: there were definitely hogs ahead. We sneaked around a little bit to see if we could see them from a distance or get a better idea of their location based on their sounds. The wind was pretty calm, maybe 3 MPH, but we took the long way around to approach the feeder with the wind in our favor. As we got closer, the moon went behind the clouds, making it much harder to see. We continued to hear them as we inched our way forward. Kevin was using my .308, a scoped rifle with illuminated crosshairs, and I was using a rifle with a dedicated light. We planned to have Kevin take the first well-aimed shot with the existing light and after we were compromised I would kick on the light and we would mop up from there. As we got to within 50 yards, Kevin was able to see one through his scope. He moved a little closer to see them better and get a steadier shot. BANG! I turned on my light and swept the area with it. We saw a scramble in the weeds, but we didn't get any more shots. Kevin felt pretty good about his shot, and when we went up to check it out we found blood, but no hog. We didn't have much luck finding a blood trail. But within minutes, we heard the unmistakable groans of a wounded hog. We got a rough idea of distance and direction, and we let some time pass for the hog to bleed out. We searched for an hour through the thicket where we pinpointed the sound, crawling around on our hands and knees. Kevin got into some mesquite and got himself full of thorns but didn't give up until he was about to crawl through some fire ant mounds. We went back to the feeder and got the Jeep to use its lights to search the area before we moved on, and finally we found the hog. But it wasn't where we heard the other noise, so we have to wonder if the bullet didn't wing another hog after it passed through the first one.

So we got the hog butchered with plenty of time for Kevin to shower before his 10am flight out of Austin. We had a great time! It certainly was an adventure.

-Mike

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