Well, I may as well throw in a bit about my experience with the Sweat Gang. The others have given you a pretty good picture of our stay at Curtis’ place the night before the hunt and our arrival on the ranch. Let me pick up at the morning hunt on Saturday.
Scott was good enough to offer me a lift into the bush. Saved me an hours walk. We cruised the senderos slowly, both of us rubbernecking and trying to make out game outlines in the pre-dawn darkness. Scott was headed for a feeder to the east of our bunkhouse camp and wanted to be there early enough to give the game time to settle before daylight. I had other ideas.
You see, I’ve never been much of a sitter. I wanted an area I could slowly still hunt through and watch for game activity. Still hunting fascinates me. Every time you take a step, your angle of view on every object within sight changes. There is always something new to see. My penchant for movement explains my rotten luck as a deer hunter. I hoped to make the technique come to a more satisfactory conclusion chasing hogs. Dressed in homemade camo and my converse sneakers, I couldn’t wait to see what the ranch had to show me.
Just under a mile from Scotts feeder, he stopped the truck and I hit the tailgate to lay down a bit of corn. Wait, you say! Real hunters don’t bait! Well, in South Texas I do. The cover there is so close to impossible to move through that I wanted to see my quarry in a more open area in order to lay plans for a stalk. I laid down a trail over about a half to three-quarters of a mile of dirt road, very sparsely. In three days, I used around twenty pounds of corn, or about what you could carry comfortably in your day pack. At the end of the trail, Scott dropped me off and circled away through the gloom to park his truck and start his long trek to a feeder off to the north of my little piece of Texas.
I didn’t want to start hunting until I had a reasonable expectation of taking a shot, so I sat down to await the Texas sunrise. As things began to shift from black to grey around me, I spent my time trying to identify all the bird warbles coming from the bushes around my position and resisting the urge to investigate every crackling twig back in the bush. Them birds are noisy down there, and the idea of cruising through a big patch of cats claw thorns when I couldn’t see well enough to avoid them kept me sitting on my pack. As the day continued to brighten, I noticed a set of three wooden corner posts off to my left. There wasn’t a fence anywhere near, so who knows what they were originally dug in to support? The sun was coming up behind the posts, making a perfect frame to shoot a few pictures of my equipment. I’m sure I spooked some game, but a guy has to have his priorities! This was a beautiful morning, and a background of sunrise framed by weathered wood was just too good to pass up.
Finally I decided I had enough light to shoot by. Time to get in some hunting! I crept to the edge of the road I had corned and found to my surprise that cattle must have wandered the area in the recent past. Fifty yards on both sides of the road, the brush was cut with cattle trails weaving in and out. Perfect! Slowly I sidled back into the brush, taking care not to add too many holes to my often office-bound butt. The trails allowed me to creep along on the downwind side of the roadway. I worked from five to sixty yards back, moving in close once in a while and peeking up and down the dirt track. Then back into the bush for another slow fifty yards. The morning was cool, the breeze was stiff and right on my forehead and the light was fantastic, haloing the bushes and prickly pear and making them seem something other than a threat.
After two hours, I again crept up to the roadway for a glance in both directions and found furry footballs obscuring my view of the Texas hardpan. Javelina! Nine of ‘em ranging from the “Mommy, Mommy!” size up to “Don’t turn your back on me!”. Forty yards away, they fed in circles, overlapping their tracks over and over and scooping up the corn like dustbusters.
Back into the bush! The wind was just right, quartering over the bush pigs and into my face. I doubled my pace, going from ooze to a purposeful crawl. I moved eighty or so yards and again worked my way slowly into view of the roadway. Where did they go? The javvies had melted into the morning like butter sliding off a hot griddle. The silence with which these little pigs move in the Texas brush has to be heard (or not heard, maybe) to be believed. Faced with a lack of options, I froze in place and waited. Two minutes and a quiet eternity later, the javvies reappeared, thirty yards upwind from my position. The big black boar was leading them in and out of the brush. They exposed themselves only long enough to get their cheeks full of corn, then retreated into the brush and moved farther down the roadway before reappearing to grub up another mouthful.
This game of tag continued for close to forty minutes, the pigs doing what their primitive natures told them to do, I trying my best to apply my civilized brain to the problem and end up in the right place at the right time. Finally, I managed to move exactly the right distance down the road as the javelina once again faded from view. I holed up with a large prickly pear formation just off my left shoulder and a cats claw bush behind me to break up my outline. The javvies again appeared on the roadway, this time twenty feet off my right shoulder and feeding my direction. Tense? A little. Of course, by this time I knew the size and shape of every hog and had time to brush away most of the jitters. The big boar stayed out of my shooting lane, but when the largest sow wandered in I decided enough was enough. My string hand crept toward my cheek and I began the mantra in my mind “Soft hands...easy now....don’t punch the shot...just let it go...right THERE!”.
The shot was a bit farther back and much higher than I had intended. With the javelina twelve yards away, I had still managed to shoot her four inches in front of the hams and an inch below the backbone. I was completely disgusted with myself. I shoot pretty well and took a rabbit on this trip at thirty yards. And here I had blown a beautiful broadside at a javelina less than half that far away! I took off my pack, sat down and began to berate myself. The dirt road was deserted once again.
After twenty minutes, I dug out my roll of toilet paper and marked the spot where I had taken the shot. Then I crept forward and marked the edge of the roadway where the javvie had been standing. Then back to my pack and a pull from the water bottle while I waited. Ten minutes later, I hear the knock of Scotts big diesel pickup coming down the sendero. As he stopped, he already had his hand out to congratulate me, having seen my flag markers from some distance away. I shamefacedly told him that congratulations were premature, as I still had to recover my game. He immediately piled out of the truck and we agreed that a very quiet sweep into the brush on the opposite side of the roadway from where the shot had occurred would give us an idea of bloodtrail and maybe recover the arrow. In we crept.
Scott found a generous streak of blood on the leaf of a prickly pear ten yards in from the roadway. We flagged it and continued to look for sign. Nothing! Not a spot of blood and too many prints from too many javelina. We backed out and headed back to the bunkhouse for help.
As luck would have it, the hunt coordinator (our own JerryG) was on the ranch with his dog. He was tracking a hog for Curtis. We made arrangements to meet at the bunkhouse when he was through. I took advantage of the downtime to wolf down more of Marcos’ Mexican cuisine and fret some more. Jerry appeared an hour later with Curtis, a wound-up tracking dog and a dead hog. The pig had gone less than forty yards after Curtis shot it, but due to the thick brush, Curtis had called in the dog rather than risk losing a downed animal. Pats on the back all he way around. Jerry grabbed a bite to eat and water and off we went to track my javelina. I explained to him what had occurred, how I had just flat messed up the shot and was worried about not finding the pig. He asked if there was blood to start the dog on. After telling him we had flagged blood at the beginning of the trail, Jerry visibly relaxed and told me the dog should be able to track the animal without any trouble.
We piled out next to my first flag and let the dog out of the back of the truck. Ten seconds later the dog had a nose full of hog scent and was tearing through the brush like an old pro. Jerry and I did our best to follow, detouring out of necessity around thorn patches too dense for us. The ringing of the bell on the dogs collar drew us along, then suddenly stopped. We couldn’t see the dog and were unsure how far ahead he had stopped. Jerry called the dog back to us, then set him on the trail again. Fifteen steps into the brush, the dog stopped again. After staring for half a minute, I realized the little terrier was standing over my javelina, dead beneath a small liveoak.
WHEW! I pumped Jerry’s hand, told the dog what a good job he had done and grabbed a leg of the javvie for the drag back to the truck. Less than ten minutes since releasing the dog from the truck, we had my javelina on the carry-all and were headed back to camp. After a round of hand-shaking (which I wasn’t sure I deserved after the shot I had made), Jerry dropped me off at the cooler on the ranch to take care of the carcass. Curtis and Rusty were there, finishing up Curtis’ hog. Like true hunting partners, they immediately lent a hand. When Rusty tells you that Curtis can dress a hog in nothing flat, believe him! I am used to butchering domestic hogs. Let’s just say my technique was a little slow for Curtis. He took over and had the hog gutted in something under a minute. I took over again, skinned the animal, recorded it’s weight and got it into the cooler. I would return later with Rusty to bone out the meat and bag it for the trip back home.
Back at the bunkhouse, the laughter curled up into the blackening sky like heat rising off those dirt two-tracks we had spent our day on. Plans were made for the hunt the following morning. I asked myself if I wanted to shoot another pig. Since I have an abundance of farm-raised pork and beef in my freezers already, I couldn’t come up with a reason to take another pig. Would two pigs make me happier than just the one? Nope. Did I want to try for something bigger? Why? Not having an answer, I decided, was answer enough. I would finish up my Texas adventure talking to new-found friends and watching the last day slide slowly by. There were pictures to be taken, memories to be fixed into place.
Timo was kind enough to gift us all with stone arrowheads in memory of our hunt together. I decided on the long drive back to Missouri that the skull of my javelina, along with the stone point and a flint knife that has been wandering my bookshelves looking for a home would come together to make a fitting desk ornament for my den. What better way to remember Texas?
Topic: Texas Sweat Update (Read 15409 times)
