For the last several months I have been checking my hog feeders, putting out soured corn, and looking for hog sign on my property with virtually no sign. It has been a little frustrating, and I was starting to get the itch to put an arrow in something. A couple of potential hunt opportunities fell through so this weekend I got up at 3am to drive with my buddy Cam to Red Slough WMA hoping to see some hog sign or nutria. Nothing but humidity and no sign for the most part, but at least I knew that I was leaving to go to Texas on Sunday for a one day hunt. I had hunted this ranch the previous 2 winters and had yet to score. The first year conditions were pretty tough because of the drought, but this year I had nobody to blame but myself.
My plan was to hunt the evening, and maybe a little beyond depending on the moonlight, and get up early in the morning to hunt until I couldn't stand the heat. I was pretty anxious and got on the road early. It was a good thing that I did, because a tire blew out on the way. I replaced it and stopped at a walmart to get my spare replaced. I didn't want to go into mesquite country with 100 degree temps forcast without a spare. This ended up turning a 4 hour trip into more like 6 hours, but I still got there in time to get out to my spot around 5:30pm. Anything earlier than that would have been a little toasty for me, anyway.
I had it all planned out, or so I thought. In february I had hunted near a stock tank that has a long canyon to it's south. Back then the hogs were working all along the canyon and coming to the stock tank at night drink. Water was at a premium with the drought. I knew that it was a little cooler in the canyon and figured the hogs would be bedding down in the canyon, and expected it to hold some water with the recent rains the area had received. Unfortunately, the canyon wasn't holding much water and the flats along the canyon were bone dry with no fresh hog sign in the areas that I checked. I decided to follow one old set of tracks and it took me back to the north where I saw one set of rootings along a road that led to the stock tank. I changed my plans and made a big circle to the north of the tank and planned on working my way back toward the tank with the south wind in my face. I was moving fast and seeing better, but not great, sign. That was, until I jumped a hog out of it's bed. Still in bed at 7 pm. I was pretty surprised, but slowed my pace quite a bit. It turned out that all of the feeder creeks leading to the stock tank were holding water, and the flats between them had much more lush grasses and the soil was more moist than elsewhere. I figured that this was the place to be.
I hadn't gone to very long when I heard squealing up ahead. I picked up my pace a little to close the distance, but I was losing ground and decided to circle a little to the west and step on it to close the gap. It worked a little too well. When I completed my semi-circle, I had hogs all around me. There started out with a little over 10, but as more filtered in there was 20-25 hogs around me. Several boars were fighting, but the cover was too thick for a shot and there were too many eyes to close in. The smallest hog that I saw was probably around 60-75 pounds, with several sows in the mid 100's, and several boars over 200#'s. Nothing over 300# that I could see. I was into them for around 15 minutes and they were milling all around me. I had made a mistake trying to close the gap and have cover in front of me. It put me too close to a mesquite tree, and I had no shooting lanes as on two separate occasions a smaller pig approached nearly straight on. In both cases I was at full draw waiting for the hog to enter a shooting lane, but as soon as the nose hit the lane, they saw me and bolted. Both of these times they would have been close enough for me to reach out and touch them with the bow. Pretty cool. Eventually more of them would get spooky and separate off from the main group and I was left to try to track them down.
I headed to the streams and had one big boar in the broadleaf cover next to the stream at 10 yard. All afternoon the winds had been 25-30 mph, but now it died down and swirled and that was that for the boar. I didn't get on any more before dark, and made my way back to the truck. It was no small task, because the mosquitos were worse than I have ever experienced. I had my thermacell on, but with the wind, my vapor cloud was behind me and somehow the mosquitos found me from the front. There is no way that I got less than a few hundred bites, sometimes seeing 5 or 6 biting my hand at the same time and others biting my through my lightweight shirt. Still a great night in my book.
I wanted to go to sleep right away so that I could get an early start the next morning. You would have thought that I should have slept peacefully, knowing that hundreds of mosquitos would be able to feed their families that night, but I don't think I slept more than an hour or so. I kept on peaking out the window at the moonlight to gauge how well I could see in it. At 1:30 it was so bright that I definitely could have hunted in it. When my clock went of at 3:00, it wasn't nearly as light, so I decided to leave around 5 and circle around to the north of the tank again, hoping to catch hogs feeding or working their way to a bedding area. I was armed with 7% deet this time. It worked like candy for them, so I did my best to keep a little buffer between me and the streams. Anyhow, the mosquitos didn't seem quite as bad this morning. Around 6:30am, I found a lone black sow feeding in a juniper copse with a few mesquite mixed in. She was rooting around some prickly pear and didn't know that I was there. She was pretty hard quartering away, but I thought that I had a shot and drew as she was moving away. The arrow took here steeply quartering and buried around 1/2 the shaft. When she bolted she turned to quarter to me and gave me a good look, and I quickly figured I had liver and probably a lung. I couldn't find a drop of blood on the ground, and there were hog tracks everywhere. Even though I tried to track what I thought were here tracks, I failed. Since I was pretty certain of a liver hit, I decided to give here a little time, but not too much since it was going to heat up fast. I heard some squealing to the south, and quickly marked my spot on the GPS, and started after them. I had to bypass around several streams and never caught up to that group. After a few hours of finding moderately fresh sign, but no hogs, I knew that it was now or never for finding the sow before the heat of the day took it. I headed back to the spot and followed around 30 yards in the direction that I thought she had taken. I started making perpendicular passes that crossed what I though was here initial trail, going a little over 100 steps, then going around 10-15 yards further and making another 100 steps, repeating until I found a nice muddy body around 90-100 yards from where I shot here. Somehow she had bitten into a juniper branch with her small tusk when she died, and I had a little trouble dislodging here. Here are some pics of her. No scale, but I think she is a tad over 200#, maybe 225#. I have shot a few boar larger, but she is my biggest sow to date.
Topic: Texas Revenge (Read 578 times)
