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Among The Leaves
Among

Posts by DanielS

Ethical Hunting and Mainstream Media

May 16, 2011 Leave a Comment Written by DanielS

I’ve always considered myself an ethical hunter. Some of my compatriots, not so much. There are indeed unethical hunters out there. I know a few of them. But one thing I do not do is condone it, nor tolerate it around me.

Thus, I feel compelled to write a bit of commentary on this commercial recently released by Dodge Ram trucks.

Watch the video on the right. I’ll wait.

Done?

What are your thoughts?

If you’re like me, you’re taken aback. In the clip the narrator calls the man an “outdoorsman” yet shows a character shooting critters just so that he can sleep in silence.

As ethical hunters, we hunt with a particular goal in mind. Most often we hunt for meat, and occasionally for a great trophy (which also supplies some fine eating). Some hunt varmints and pests both for the thrill of the hunt as well as to control population growth and reduce damage.

No ethical hunter I’ve ever met shoots a beast of the field simply because it is noisy or annoying. Here, however, Ram Trucks portrays hunters as willing to take the life of a bird or beast just to make themselves a bit more comfortable at night.

Dodge Ram and Chrysler do a disservice to true outdoorsmen and hunters everywhere with this commercial. I’m all for their marketing of Ram trucks towards hunters and adventurers. I’m sure they’re well built vehicles. But to portray their target audience in such a way makes our efforts to promote ethical hunting that much more difficult.

Ethics, Hunting, Media
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The Feral Hog Problem

May 13, 2011 Leave a Comment Written by DanielS

Not convinced that feral hogs are a problem in North America? Take a gander at the video on the right.

That’s a pretty good infestation, but unfortunately herds of that size are not terribly unusual across much of the Southern United States. Texas and the deep South in particular have a massive hog problem.

Most of the affected states have listed feral hogs as a non-native invasive species. The majority of those jurisdictions have no closed season on hogs and allow hunters, ranchers, and farmers to kill as many as they can. Because the infestation is so great in some areas, many farmers and ranchers kill as many as they can, much more than they can possible process into usable meat, and leave the carcasses to rot in the field.

I’m not a big fan of hunting in this method. I prefer to use every bit of every animal that I kill, but when you’ve got literally hundreds or thousands of hogs destroying crop and grazing land, it’s difficult to control them AND utilize the critter for food, leather, and other products.

Texas just passed a law making it legal for landowners to sell “hunts” on their land for feral hogs using airborne gunners in helicopters. I use the term “hunting” lightly because I feel that it is important to differentiate between ethical subsistence hunting and pest control. Given a non-native invasive species like feral hogs, I’ve no problem with people flying around and shooting the things and letting them lie where they fall.

It’s fun, it’s great sport to target moving critters from an airborne platform, and I applaud the land owners for finding a way to eradicate feral hogs from their property without spending a ton of cash on professional hunters and trappers. But lets not mince words: this is not hunting. It’s pest control in a target rich environment.

Hunting
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Barrel Twist in the AR-15

April 12, 2011 Leave a Comment Written by DanielS

Since the early days of firearm building, armorers noted that if they imparted spin to the projectile that it greatly enhanced in-flight stability and accuracy. The earliest rifles had numerous bands of metal that were forged together and twisted to create the helical shape of the rifle groves. As machining processes were developed and refined, hammer forged barrels became popular as they were much stronger and much more precise.

Rifle twist is represented with a “1;” a colon; and another number, such as 1:7, 1:9, 1:10, 1:12, etc. The second number is the length in inches that it takes for the grooves to make one complete revolution. Thus, a 1:10 twist rifle barrel makes a complete 360 degree revolution in 10 inches. A 1:7 rifle barrel on the other hand makes a complete turn in only 7 inches, giving it a much tighter faster rate of twist (and consequently a greater RPM to the bullet).

The Greenhill Formula, developed by Sir Alfred George Greenhill, lays out the mathematics for computing the optimum spin and rifle twist necessary to stabilize a bullet. His most basic calculation is:

where C = 150 (or 180 for muzzle velocities greater than 2,800 fps) D = bullet caliber (in inches) L = bullet length (in inches) and SG = bullet’s specific gravity (10.9 for most lead bullets). For lead core bullets, the second half of the equation is disregarded as the value of the square root of 10.9/10.9 is 1, however the value will need to be calculated for steel core, steel jacketed, or frangible bullets as their specific gravity will vary. Because of the high muzzle velocity of most 5.56/.223 rounds, C should be set to equal 180 in the above formula.

What does all of this mean? For most shooters, not much. For our purposes, it means we can determine the appropriate twist based off of the bullet weight for a given caliber since bullet length is generally a function of the combination of bullet weight and caliber. Having said that, we’re not going to delve any deeper into the mathematics of calculating the optimal barrel twist for various bullet designs. Instead, we’ll lay out the basics and give you some good guidelines to go by when figuring whether or not your AR-15 barrel will stabilize a given round.

In general, you want a faster twist (lower second number) for heavier bullets. Firing lighter bullets through a fast twist barrel can over spin them, causing inaccuracy from overstability and/or spin induced drift. Overstability occurs primarily in light weight projectiles fired from a fast twist AR barrel and causes the bullet nose to remain at a high angle of attack during the descent phase of the flight trajectory, due to extreme gyroscopic stability. Extremely light weight, thin jacketed varmint rounds, that are overspun past 300,000 RPM, can even fly apart from the immense centrifugal forces imparted by the bullet spin.

For 5.56/.223 bullets weighing between 35 and 50 grains, you can use a 1:12 or 1:14 twist. 1:9 (probably the most common twist found in AR rifles) and 1:10 are good, moderate twist rates that are capable of stabilizing bullets weighing from 45 to 69 and even 70 grain bullets. For the heaviest 5.56/.223 bullets, you will need a 1:7 to 1:8 twist barrel in order to reliably stabilize bullets weighting between 69 and 90 grains.

There are some odd barrels out there being used to fire heavily customized .223 loads. Some custom barrels are available in a 1:6.5 twist and are capable of stabilizing 100 grain bullets, though that weight is not very common and difficult, if not impossible, to find. Extremely high velocity loads firing a bullet weighing 55 grains or less, at speeds exceeding 4,000 feet per second, require a very slow twist rate of 1:15 to 1:16.

Most shooters find that a 1:9 twist barrel meets their needs quite well, but if you’re going to be firing heavier match loads, or lighter, faster varmint rounds, you’ll need to search for a barrel with a more appropriate twist rate.

Firearms, Rifles
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Steel Tatara Made From Scratch

April 7, 2011 Leave a Comment Written by DanielS

Start with a little bit of this…

End up with a little bit of this…

…and forge it into something like this!

This guy crafted a steel tatara beginning with nothing more than a handful of red clay powder, a forge, and a bit of ingenuity.

I love projects like this. While it is not strictly bushcraft, the concept of beginning with ore mined from the earth and refining it into steel before forging a high quality blade is true in spirit. True, some additional tools and modern equipment are incredibly useful when undertaking such an endeavor, but almost every step performed could be duplicated with only the use of primitive tools and materials.

Blades, Knives
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April Fools Win!

April 2, 2011 Leave a Comment Written by DanielS

US Cavalry gets my nomination for the winner of April Fools Day 2011.

They partnered with Tru-Spec to produce a new BDU load bearing system, MOLLE Extreme. Watch the video, then go check out the website. I guarantee it good for a laugh.

Clothing, Gear
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Proper Planning Makes For A Successful Hunt

March 22, 2011 Leave a Comment Written by DanielS

Other than a bunch of squirrels (note to self: next time bring the .22 too) and a few deer (which are out of season), we didn’t see much this trip.

Went out this weekend to help put a dent in the feral hog population on a nearby piece of public hunting lands, as well as fill my freezer a little more.

We arrived predawn and made ready for the hike in. Public lands in this area have been restricted to foot traffic only, and the areas that hold wild pigs are a few miles from the parking area. Not 5 minutes after we began the trek, I began to lose hope that we would be bringing home the bacon this day.

Normally, hog sign is prevalent. Scat, foot prints, and rubs, are generally found in great abundance as we head from the grasslands into the riparian flatwood terrain that feral hogs favor in this region. Instead, I saw very little indication of recent activity.

In retrospect, I should have known better. The past few months have been exceptionally dry, and while this often causes wild game to travel father to find food, hogs tend to stick closer to water sources than other medium sized game. As the streams and rivers in the area dried up or slowed to a trickle, the local swine population likely retreated to areas where water was more easily found.

Undeterred, we continued to hike in until we came to the swampy bottoms surrounding a major creek. Hog sign was indeed abundant here, but it was old. Weeks and even months old in some cases. While the hogs may have been here in the past, they had long since moved on.

I spotted a deer, a small buck that snorted when he noticed our presence before staring at us a few brief seconds. Deer season had ended weeks ago, so we just stood there watching the buck watching us. Eventually, deciding he’d seen enough, the buck sneezed and bounded off into the forest.

The morning was turning into midday and the sun, for brief moments, began to burn through the grey haze overhead. Hog activity would be low until later in the evening when the heat from an early spring warm front began to wane. We stopped for a break and a snack to contemplate the lack of hogs and our rotten luck.

Ideally, had I been by myself, I’d have headed farther south into the deeper swamps and lowlands to seek out the areas that the hogs had retreated too. We had already hiked nearly 4 miles into the woods, and the area I had in mind was another 2 miles further.

There was no vehicle or ATV traffic allowed on the property we were hunting. Wherever we harvested a hog, we would have to hike it back out the same distance over rough terrain. Having made that type of hike before, I wasn’t looking forward toward dragging or carrying a few hundred pounds of meat 6 miles or more back to where we parked without the aid of a horse or 4-wheeler.

My hunting partner was new to the concept of a “walk-in-hunt” but that was the only type available on the public lands we were on. His muscles fatigued from the hike in, he’d stumbled a couple of times and pulled muscles in both legs.

Between his fatigue and my lack of desire to haul any hogs that we found the long hike back out, we decided to take advantage of the lack of midday activity and head back to the truck to reposition to a different location for that evening. When we got back however, after a few minutes rest, he decided his legs had gotten the better of him. He wouldn’t be joining me on any more stalks that day.

I pondered the situation for a few minutes, and decided that we were going call it a day. It wouldn’t be fair to leave my hunting buddy in the truck while I went out on another stalk that afternoon. We packed it in but, determined to not have wasted the entire day, I decided to head to a new location closer to the lake and the the water to scout out for any signs of hog activity.

We weren’t successful in taking any hogs on this trip, but the trip as whole was still a success. We learned where the hogs were not and, more importantly, I learned an important lesson about planning the trip.

First and foremost, as important as it is to know your own physical limits when planning on a long hike and stalk, it is equally as important to be aware of the physical conditioning of your companions. Whether you are hunting, hiking, backpacking, or stuck in life or death survival situation, you are always only as strong as your weakest link.

In retrospect, I should have scouted the property more recently and, with the knowledge that my hunting buddy did not have much experience taking part in long stalks, planned on setting up a blind closer to where the hogs were located.

For experienced hunters, it’s usually not a big deal to pack up for an impromptu day hunt with little pre-planning. When taking out a new hunter however, plan ahead. It can make the experience more enjoyable both for you and for the newbie, and that can make the difference between creating a lifelong hunter or turning somebody off to the activity forever.

Hunting, Scouting, Stalking
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What gun for… ?

January 31, 2011 Leave a Comment Written by DanielS

I get this question probably more than any other. What caliber should I choose for wild boar? What about elk? Moose? Texas whitetailed deer? Mule deer? What if I find myself out on a bear hunt and I come across a moose, which I also have a license for and is conveniently in season, what gun should I take?

Folks, first of all, there is no one magic caliber or rifle. Second of all, there are far too many other variables. What is the terrain? Are you going to be hunting in dense brush where your maximum range might top out at 75 yards, or are you seeking out game on wide open rolling plains where a 300 yard shot is considered normal?

At the end of the day, you should choose a rifle that you can comfortable shoot accurately, that won’t cause you to flinch from excessive recoil, and that has enough energy to reliably drop your quarry. Ammunition availability and cost is another consideration as well, since having a rifle you can’t find affordable ammunition for renders it pretty much useless.

Still, there are some calibers favored by sportsmen. A .30-06, .308, .270, or even a 6.5×55 can be used on any game animal found in North America. In fact, outside of Africa (and maybe Australian Water buffalo), these calibers are useful on any medium or large game found throughout the entire world. Get a rifle that you can shoot comfortably in one of these calibers and top it off with a good quality 3-9x scope and you’ll be well equipped for most any hunt.

Hunting, Rifles
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Maximum Point Blank Range: What distance should you zero your rifle for?

January 10, 2011 2 Comments Written by DanielS

Comparison by Winchester Ballistics of various weight .308 and .223 bullet trajectories fired out of a rifle zeroed at 25 yards. Click to Embiggen.

It’s a common question: what distance should you zero your rifle for? Many hunters I know simply zero their rifles at whatever distance is available at their local range. But is this the ideal distance to have your scope set at? The answer varies depending on the caliber your rifle is chambered in and what game you are pursuing.

Let’s talk for a bit about what Maximum Point Blank Range (MPBR) is. In a nutshell, the MPBR is the maximum range at which you can aim your rifle directly at any target within that distance and be reasonably assured that your round will hit. What that distance is depends on the size of your target, the round you are firing, and the configuration of your rifle.

On medium sized North American game animals, the size of the vital area is generally 10 inches in diameter. That gives you 5 inches of bullet rise above the sight height and another 5 inches of drop below the sight height.

To figure the best distance to have your scope dialed on at, you’ll need to know your rifle and chosen ammunition well, and you’ll need to be able to do a little bit of math. But to help you out, there are online ballistic calculators available from Winchester and a very comprehensive calculator over at JBM Ballistics. In general, you’ll need to know the ammunition you are using including the bullet weight as well as the muzzle velocity it achieves in your firearm. If possible, it helps to know the bullet length and the ballistic coefficient. Both Winchester and JBM ballistics have fairly comprehensive libraries with all of this information included with particular Winchester cartridges or bullets in the case of JBM Ballistics. The final piece of information you’ll need is the height of the center line of your scope over the rifle bore. In most modern firearms this ranges from about an inch up to around 2.5 inches.

If you’re using a .308 caliber rifle, depending on your load, you’ll have a maximum point blank range of just over 300 yards. A 150 grain .308 caliber Barnes XLC boattail bullet will top out with 4.8 inches of rise at 150 yards and be dead on at 300 yards. This gives you “minute of deer” accuracy out to nearly 350 yards, meaning that with the crosshairs of your scope centered on the vital area of a deer, you will be assured of a solid hit at any distance out to 350 yards.

For most modern rifles, I usually recommend zeroing at a distance between 100 and 300 yards. The higher the ballistic coefficient of the bullet and the faster it is traveling when it leaves the muzzle, the longer the distance you can expect to be able to have your rifle zeroed for. Obviously, if you have a .22 caliber squirrel gun, the size of your target is much smaller and consequently your MPBR will be much shorter, usually only 50 or 100 yards. Small fast varmint rounds may have a high muzzle velocity, but due to their light weight and low ballistic coefficient, they lose speed fast. Most varmint rifles will do well to be zeroed at distances between 200 and 300 yards. For larger calibers capable of making shots out past 600 yards, especially some of the larger .30 caliber belted magnums, you can reasonably zero your scope and rifle for 400 yards and beyond.

Not many people have access to a 300 yard range, but with the help of a a ballistic table, you can calculate exactly how high or low the round should impact at any distance. The .308 load we mentioned earlier has 4.8 inches of rise at 150 yards, but what if you only have access to 25 and 100 yard ranges? You can get the rifle on paper by zeroing it at 25 yards, and then fine tune it until your group is centered at 3.9 inches high at 100. A bullet fired from a rifle starts out anywhere from 1″ to as much as 2.5″ below the sight height. For a rifle zeroed at 25 yards this means that the bullet must climb fairly steeply, and of course it will continue to climb for another hundred yards or so before reaching the apex and beginning to descend. For this particular load, the initial 25 yard zero should get you roughly on target at 300 yards. By confirming that your rounds are hitting 3.9 inches high at 100 yards you’ll get the rifle much closer to being precisely on target at 300.

I don’t know of any hunters running bench rest guns capable of putting a 5 shot group inside the diameter of a quarter at 600 yards. If you’re running a traditional .30-30 in the thick South Texas brush, a 100 yard zero is probably just fine. But for most other situations, it only makes sense to zero your scope and rifle combination for the Maximum Point Blank Range, which depends on your quarry and the caliber of your rifle.

Hunting, Rifles
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End of A Successful Deer Season

January 7, 2011 Leave a Comment Written by DanielS

There was quite a bit of activity all season on the game camera. Most of it was when I wasn’t there. This one photo always cracks me up.

Regular deer season has come to an end here in Texas. I went out on 4 hunts and managed to bring home two deer: one 10 point buck and one 90 pound doe.

The first hunt was the 1st Annual Hog Hunt (can it be annual if it’s the first one?) with Bryan and some of the crew from ITS Tactical. Although it started as a hog hunt, it became a deer hunt when the landowner graciously allowed us to harvest a doe or buck should we have the opportunity since it was opening weekend for deer season. It was a good thing too, because nobody harvested anything except for Rocky who tagged a young 6 point buck. In fact, only one hog was spotted at all by myself, but it was moving fast about 150-200 yards away and I didn’t have time to line up a shot before it disappeared into the thick brush.

Most of the guys who went out on that trip had little or no hunting experience, although everybody was experienced with firearms and most had prior military experience. Despite the lack of hunting experience, it turns out that many of the skills learned in the military are also useful when pursuing hog and deer.

Since Rocky, who bagged the small buck, had no experience field dressing, skinning, or quartering a deer I offered my expertise and instructed while he worked on the deer with a friend. In return I got to take home the skin, which has now been tanned (a process I will discuss in a later post).

The next week I spent out hunting Caddo National Grasslands, public hunting land which is very difficult to hunt since it is besieged by over a hundred hunters on opening week. Public lands in Texas are walk-in hunting only, and Caddo National Grasslands is a broad stretch of land, with the area I hunt covering more than 10,000 acres. This means that I often have to hike for a couple of miles into deep heavy cover to get to where the deer are. Unfortunately, I came up empty. But, that’s why they call it hunting and not shooting.

A few weeks later I took my wife, Dreamer Dez, out hunting for her first time ever. She didn’t know if she’d have it in her to “shoot Bambi” but she does enjoy the outdoors and has no problem helping me process the deer that I bring home, so we went out to a friend’s ranch in Central Texas for Doe Day weekend. Doe Days are designated dates set by the Texas Parks and Wildlife in areas with very large doe populations. This was definitely the case where we were hunting. A census done the year before counted more than 75 does on less than 700 acres. That’s quite the population!


Dreamer Dez scans the underbrush for any signs of movement.

To her credit, Dez shot at a little 50 pound piglet with my 6.5×55 Swedish Mauser but missed low, sending up a fountain of dirt and scaring off the herd. Myself, I managed to harvest a good sized doe that would put a dent into refilling the deep freeze with venison.

Later the next month I would head back out in search of a monster buck we’d seen while hunting antlerless during Doe Days. This buck was a monster: he looked like he had a damn tumbleweed on his head. There was no way to estimate the number of points on this massive atypical deer. I spent the better part of the weekend stalking this buck. Deer of that age are like ghosts. Spooky. Silent. Cautious, even during the rut.

While stalking one morning I spotted a small 8-point trailing after a doe about 300 yards across a property line. I lay down prone and waited patiently as they made their way down a clearing towards the fence where I would have a shot. As I watched them make their way towards me, suddenly the massive buck came crashing out of the trees and into the side of the smaller 8-point. The smaller buck quickly wheeled around to face his challenger, but both of them soon crashed into thick heavy timber nearby. I never saw either one of them again.

In fact, I didn’t see another legal buck until the very last morning. Having seen the two bucks in full rut the day before, I decided to break out the doe bleat call I’d purchased before that trip. It was an impulse buy. I don’t usually use calls, but figured what the heck. After a brief walk through the predawn frost I entered the clearing where my blind was set up and startled two does who were feeding along the treeline. They both sneezed and bounded off and I made it to my blind where I got set up and waited for thins to quiet down.

After about 30 minutes I sounded 3 short doe bleats and sat back to wait. Incredibly, not 10 minutes later, a large (well, large for Central Texas) buck came trotting into the clearing. He was in full rut, head up and ears alert, looking around for the doe he thought he’d heard. I counted 8 points on his head, 3 on each side with brow tines. His main beam stretched just beyond his ears, making him a legal buck in Texas.

The shot was good and dropped him in his tracks. I waited a while and text messaged my buddies in nearby blinds to let them know what had transpired. When I got up and approached the deer I noticed that the brow tines were actually split, with two points long enough to make him a 10 point buck. His pedicles were wide in diameter, marking him as being about 3-4 years old.

That was the last buck I would take this year. I’ll still be out in the woods though. There’s a peace that can’t be found anywhere else but far out in the wilderness, where cell phone signals can’t reach and the roar of traffic on nearby highways cannot be heard. There are squirrels and rabbits to hunt in the off season, and there’s room in the freezer for another feral hog or two that I find while out scouting and hiking.

The woods and meadows that remain in our increasingly urbanized world call to me, and I long to be out in them. Among the leaves.

Hunting

A Central Texas Hog Hunt

December 11, 2010 Leave a Comment Written by DanielS

Long time no blog… yeah, I know. It’s hunting season, and I’ve been out stalking deer and hogs for the last 6 weeks. Some days I came back empty handed, but more often than not I came back with a hog or a deer. Which is great, until you consider all of the work that goes into skinning and tanning the hide, processing the meat, etc. For the most part, I’ve finished processing all of the game, though there are a few hides that aren’t quite done being tanned yet.

Three weeks ago Ambulance Driver, Alan from SnarkyBytes.com and Matt G and I, along with some other friends, set off to hunt some wild boar in the hardwood bottoms of Central Texas. Friday night we got settled into our little cabin in the woods and found we had some time to make sure the couple of new hunters we had with us had their rifles zeroed.

5 minutes later AD was using a bit of DuraBond to close up a small cut on his UK friend Limey Buddy, who had gotten scope-bit when firing an 8mm Mauser. Not easily deterred, we decided the rifles were hitting “minute of hog” split up to head to our respective blinds and stands.

I chose to set up in a 20 foot tower stand on top of a hill overlooking a feeder set close to the creek bottom. Most of the area I could see was sparsely populated with cedars and tall grasses, which would make it difficult to spot any hogs coming up from the creek towards the feeder. I wasn’t even sure that they would hit the feeder, as the game cameras had shown them only intermittently and with the rainy spring and summer we’d had this year, the acorn crop was more than abundant. If I was a hog, I wouldn’t leave the abundant acorns and safety of the thick brushy creek bottom.


The large sow came to rest beneath a large stand of cedars.

But I’m not a hog. After about 45 minutes of sitting in my stand watching a herd of cattle mosey about below me, I noticed their ears perk up and they began to move off. Not long after that I heard the tell-tale grunts and squeals of wild hogs coming up from the creek.

The young boars came up first, followed by little year-old piglets. None of them were old enough or large enough for me to want, but then a large alpha-sow appeared. She kept to the safety of the cedars and tall grass, making a clear shot difficult. I kept the crosshairs of the scope atop my Howa 1500 trained on her last position as she rooted and foraged out of sight among the tall grasses, and eventually she emerged into a clearing where they had previously rooted up a good sized wallow.

Bingo.

Reacting to the shot, she wheeled towards me and ran straight at the tower before veering off to the right and diving into a thick stand of cedar choked oak trees. I texted my companions to let them know what had happened and settled in to wait until sunset when we would meet up to track and recover her.

Sunset came quickly, and I clambered out of the tower as MattG and some of the rest of the crew showed up to help track. A bright red blood trail quickly became evident, and we soon found her piled up near a stand of cedars not 100 yards away. She was huge, much larger up close than she appeared from the safety of my stand.

While I was glad to have harvested such a large hog, one considered a destructive invasive species in this part of the world, I knew just how much work it would take to transform this beautiful beast into pork loin and sausage for my freezer. We hauled her out and loaded her into a truck for the drive back to the cabin. Once there, she weighed in at a hair over 250 pounds live weight. I began the arduous task of cleaning and skinning her. AD volunteered the use of his Alaska Knife set – which I have to say I was insanely jealous of. It was a beautiful knife set bundled in a well crafted scabbard and included a caping knife as well as a large skinner and cleaver. AD even pitched in and helped with the skinning, a process which is much more difficult on feral hogs than on most other North American game animals.

The process of skinning and quartering took a while, but soon enough I had the quarters on ice in the cooler and it was time to relax. Turning my attention to the rest of our motley crew, I found that while I had been busy processing my kill they had broken out the beer and grilled up some very nice sized steaks. I wasn’t terribly hungry, having eaten a large lunch earlier, but this was one of the more enjoyable parts of any hunting trip: getting the chance to sit around and socialize with good friends.

The next morning dawned cold and overcast. I chose a stand set up just inside the treeline of a creek bottom about a mile away from where I’d been successful the night before. Having been the only one to harvest anything so far, I took along Limey Buddy, one of the less experienced hunters, with me in the hopes that he would be able to harvest his first hog.

Sure enough, not long after the sky began to turn grey and the the first hints of sunlight danced with the treetops, a bachelor group of young boars came up the creek, foraging among the fallen leaves. I pointed them out and began to line up my own shot on one on the right. Limey Buddy fired before I was quite ready, and the entire herd scattered at the sound. I couldn’t quite tell whether the shot had hit or not, but we sat back anyway to give things time to quiet down some. Not 5 minutes later two more boars appeared out of the thick brush across the creek and my partner fired again. This time the shot looked good, and again the wild hogs dashed off into the undergrowth.


AD demonstrates pairing food with scotch whiskey while out hunting.

I texted a summary of the past few minutes events and we relaxed in the ground blind while things quieted down again. After about 30 minutes I ventured from our hiding spot to see if I could spot any blood trail. The footprints and disturbed leaves were easy to spot, and I followed the trail for about 30-40 yards but didn’t see even a speck of blood. The other hog he shot at appeared to be a clean miss as well: obvious footprints and disturbed earth and leaves, but no blood whatsoever. Not wanting to leave our quarry possibly killed or injured and unrecovered, we combed the woods and creek bottom for more than 2 hours but didn’t see anything to indicate that either one had been hit.

We returned to camp to find that nobody else had been successful either. A few deer had been seen, but none were legal to shoot at the time. After a filling breakfast I headed down south a few miles to a deer property I had access to in order to scout out some scrapes and rub lines for a deer hunt the next week.

That afternoon we reconvened to determine who would be setting up in which stand. Knowing that the hogs would be keeping to the creeks and river bottoms after the activities and shooting that morning and the night before, I chose a remote blind set up about 50 yards from a little draw that lead into a larger creek system. I sat there all afternoon, and while I could hear the hogs no more than 20 yards away, they never came up out of the thick brush and I never had a shot. Towards sunset however, I heard a shot from one of the nearby stands.

“Finally,” I thought, “Someone other than myself managed to see something and got a successful shot. Upon returning to the cabin however we discovered that Jeff had shot at a hog and missed. He blamed “crosswind”. It turns out that the hog he shot at was about 100 yards away. Something didn’t quite add up… the winds were only blowing 15-20 and gusting to 30. That meant that if he had a full value crosswind the shot would only be 3″ off at 100 yards. AD and I, not being talented mathematicians, still managed to put 2 and 2 together to determine that a small EF5 tornado had touched down between Jeff and the hog just at the moment he fired the shot, and the 250 mph winds had blown his round more than two feet and caused him to miss the hog completely.

Everyone was pretty dejected about not having harvested anything. I even felt a bit guilty that I had been the only one to have been successful so far. For a minute or so at least. Alan stoked up the fire while AD carved off a backstrap from the hog I’d bagged the night before and we dined in style on twice-baked potatoes and wild hog backstrap. Jeff had left a half a bottle of scotch and soon enough that came out and, as they do when scotch is involved, hijinks ensued.

Predawn the next morning I set out on my own for the same ground blind that Limey Buddy and I had seen hogs the morning before. No sooner had I settled into the camouflaged blind did I hear something moving in the underbrush to my right about 20 yards away. It was dark, too dark to really make out what was rustling around out there beneath the canopy of trees. But it kept coming towards me, and soon I could make out the tell-tale stripes of a skunk making a beeline towards my hiding spot. I cursed underneath my breath. He was just outside my blind now, nosing underneath the edge of the floorless tent-like structure. The last thing I wanted was to get sprayed by the startled skunk when he came up inside and discovered that he was not alone inside the ground blind.

I cleared my throat and hissed “Shoo!” hoping that would be enough to dissuade the determined Mustelid. The skunk’s activity stopped and after a brief pause I heard him head back into the underbrush. After breathing a sigh of relief I settled back into my chair and scanned the river bottom for any sign of hog activity.

Nothing moved for some while. Nothing I was looking for at any rate. Squirrels played in the branches of trees nearby and an armadillo rooted around in the fallen leaves about 10 yards behind me, but I didn’t see any sign of hog. I had just decided to give it another 30 minutes before giving up and heading in when I heard hooves moving through the flatwood riparian terrain on the other side of a dry creekbed. The wind was not in my favor. Almost as soon as he came crashing through the undergrowth, the medium sized black boar skidded to a stop and huffed in my direction. Both ears were up and he glared right at my position, standing stock still. He was strongly quartered towards me and I could hear him growl as I slowly squeezed the trigger.

I fired and he turned and ran back along the same path he had come. 25 minutes later, after a brief search, we located him. He was back in some very thick cedars uphill from where he’d encountered me and it took a bit to haul him out, but we got him loaded up into the 4×4 after about 45 minutes effort.

Ambulance Driver explains the sentiment that was shared among my fellow hunters upon my return to our cabin in the woods:

Sunday morning saw us getting desperate, since our hunt ended at noon. Once again, we heard one of us shoot, and we arrived back at camp to discover it had been Daniel. Again. Being blessed with blind shithouse luck the excellent hunter that he is, he managed to score on another hog, a 150-pound boar.

I felt pretty bad now, I had gotten two hogs and at this point everyone else would be going home empty handed. Or so I thought. Not to be outdone, MattG, Alan, and another of AD’s buddies loaded up in a pickup truck and drove down to a swampy area, determined to get at least one hog before we had to leave at noon that day. I heard some shots about 30 minutes later, but they sounded too far away to be our guys. AD felt differently: they’d all taken AR-15s with them, not the bolt guns we’d been using earlier.

“That’s an AR15,” he said. “That was pretty fast for a bolt throw. They’re on the hogs.”

And sure enough, he was right. They’d scared up a group of hogs and shot two on the run. Alan was sure that he had hit his, but they were unable to find a blood trail. T on the other hand managed get a small 80 lb. female hog, the perfect size for the smoker.

It was, by all accounts, a great weekend out hunting with old friends and new. Not everyone got to take a hog, but nobody went home empty handed. We all took home the memories of another great weekend spent among friends and among the leaves.

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