Very quick, but successful, hunt in south TX -javi mount back

[pdk25]

Just got back from a hog hunt at Fair Chase LTD, in El Indio, Texas.  What should have been a 9 hour drive turned into over 13 hours because of snow/ice from a little south of Ft. Worth all the way to my house.  Funny, because I was enjoying 70 degree temps yesterday.  Anyhow, that is why I am only now finished getting my pics to imgur and ready to post.

A friend of mine invited me to go hunting along with him and two of his friends a few months ago, and I agreed to go, and I was all set to leave on yesterday morning(Thursday).  On Tuesday morning, I get a call saying that all three of the other people suddenly can't make it.  There is no time for me to find anyone to fill in, so I call the ranch to make sure that it is okay if I still come. Rob, who runs the hunts down there, says it is okay, but it would be better to drive down Wednesday, and hunt on Thursday and Friday, because bad weather is coming for the weekend.  I get the OK from work, and make the uncomplicated drive down, getting there in plenty of time to get some evening practice in, and go over the game plan. Nice, I have the whole ranch to myself for the next two days, and this is the last javelina hunt at the ranch for the season.

You are only allowed to shoot one animal per day of paid hunting, and this keeps a target rich environment for the ranch.  My plan was to take any adult javelina as soon as possible, then to be selective for a nice boar javelina after that, always noting that I won't pass up  shot at a monster hog if it presents itself.  I told this to Rob, and he thought it was a good plan, but also told me that It would be next to impossible for me to find a hog on the ranch that was a big as the 263# boar that I shot at home a couple weeks back.  The plan was to get out before daybreak and sit at a feeder for an hour, then stalk the roads and senderos for the rest of the morning, get some breakfast then go out again in the later afternoon.

So Thursday morning I get dropped at my tripod with a walkie talkie, and I climb up.  Before I can even put my outer layers on (40 degrees in the morning) and pick up my bow, a group of javelina come in and are all around me.  A nice boar is at 6 yards, but it is quiet, and he got a little jumpy when he smelled where I walked.  Fortunately, when they realized that there was no corn around, they faded back into the brush, giving me a chance to grab my bow, and arrow, and put my vest on.

Before to long, the feeder went off, and the javelina came in, minus the nice boar.  There were 5 in the group of 12 that had a white color to them.  I am unaware of anywhere else that this is the case.  These are off-limits for hunting, as they are trying to get the numbers up to a hunt-able population.  Fun to look at though.

         

[pdk25]

Anyhow, I am just watching the group, trying to decide on which non-white javi to select, when the boar javi comes down the road. He never goes to the feeder, and only stays around the edges, possibly still spooked by my trail.  The only problem with that theory is that by not going to the feeder, he eventually gives me an even closer shot, quartering slightly away, I take him through the heart with a vpa 3 blade, and he crashes of into the brush behind me.  No groan, just a thrash, then silence.  I am certain he is finished, and the other javelina come back in to the feeder from wherever they had scattered to, and I politely let them finish the corn, and after they move back into the brush, I track the javelina 15 yards to where he expired, I drag him to the road and take a pic.  I call on the walkie talkie and Smiley, the ranch manager, heads down to pick up the javelina from the road, skin it, butcher it, and freeze it.  All while I head down the road to pursue other game.  Treatment like that will make a man lazy, lol.

 

I guess I should mention that I am still using my Silvertip Recurve, 62# @ 29", and beeman mfx classic shafts.

[MR BILL SHORTY]

   

[Alexander Traditional]

Way to go! My buddy has a few on his ranch near Corpus,but i've never seen one. Is that a conventional VPA or the 1.25"?

[pdk25]

The wind is out of the Northeast, and I follow a ranch road to the west to begin hunting North, along the edge of a lake.  I have been heading North for a little while, not seeing anything when Smiley drives along and tells me he saw a nice boar hog on a nearly parallel road a little off.  I hop in the truck and get dropped off at the start of that road and I hunt that road with no sign of javi or hog.  I quickly retrace my steps to get back to my original route, and just as I am coming along the lake, I see the hairy tufted ears of a nice boar hog quartering away from my rooting in the grass along the road.  He is maybe 70-80 yards away, and I slip an arrow out of my quiver and hug the brush to break up my outline and head towards him.  I get 60 yards away and he lifts his head, grunts, and takes off into the thick brush to he west, and the question of why is answered as I feel a stray shifty wind on the back of my neck.  Nothing to be done about it.  That is hog hunting when the wind isn't strong enough.

I continue on ahead and make it to the end of the corned sender, where there are thick prickly pear cacti.  The terrain looks good, and I decide to go a little further ahead.  I catch a glimpse of something black up ahead, and slowly a group of 13 javelina come out of a canal and head toward the road.  The pass me at distances ranging from 12-25 yards, but none of these are large enough that I want to shoot them.  Further to the east, I see 2 larger javelina come out of the brush, and head my way, probably joining up with the others.  These are a little more alert, and they spot me in the relatively thin cover, and take off the way they came, while the others start to feed on the road behind me.

I figure that I have nothing to loose, so I take a couple steps into cover, pull out my javelina distress call, and make what I think sound like a javelina getting chewed on, or at least getting his butt kicked.  I have heard great reports of success doing this when you bust up a group.  Apparently these javelina didn't get the memo.  The two that spooked didn't come back, and the rest of the group just fed at a fast pace away from me.  Fortunately, they didn't wind me, and I decided to circle far to the west then south, and get back to the road ahead of them in hopes that the larger javelina would rejoin them.  The first circle didn't work.  They were moving to fast, and as I approached the road from the west, I could see I was on the same level as them when I was still 80 yards from the road.  I went back west and made a much larger circle, and finally got far enough south and ahead of them on the road.

The pace of the javelina slowed, and they began to feed more in earnest, but still made their way to me.  I got into some brush to west where I would be concealed and waited for them to come the last 30 yards or so to give me a good shot.  At this point, the larger boar had not rejoined the group, but my the time they got parallel to me he had.  I pulled out my binoculars to be sure, and nearly ruined everything.  The glare from the lens ( I was facing east) drew the attention of a smaller boar, who started to stir everyone up.  The nicer boar was quartering away, but I thought it was now or never, and took the shot.  The javelina scattered in all directions at the shot, but the one I shot, and another boar took off into the brush to the east, then headed a little north.  I made a note of where I though that he crashed, and decided to give him a little time.  I only waited around 25 minutes, and since it was warming up rapidly, went to look for him.  I found him only 10 yards off of the road, right where I heard the crash.  

Even though both boar weighed exactly 50# on the scale, this one was considerably older and thicker than the first one.  The only problem was, it had taken me only 3 hours to reach the annual limit for javelina in Texas, and to kill both of the animals that I was allowed to kill for my 2 day hunt.  

 

 

 

This time I was using an arrow tipped with a Simmons tigershark.  Those heads have treated me very well.  This is the very same head that killed my 263# boar 2 weeks ago.

[pdk25]

So now what the heck am I going to do, drive back to Oklahoma already?  I talk to Rob, and we come to an arrangement. I can still hunt rabbits and such, and if I see a hog that I want to shoot, I can do that for a fee.  We figure that I will hunt Thursday night, and Friday morning, then leave for home after the morning hunt, because it may start to rain Friday afternoon.

The wind shifts to being out of the east for the evening, and I setup at a quad-pod near a feeder.  I feel that it is too exposed, and opt to get in the brush and make some small shooting lanes, and relax and see what happens.  The feeder goes off at 4:45, but nothing comes except some birds.  There has been no hard-frost in this part of south Texas this winter, so there is a lot of grass and forbs available, so the hogs can hit the salad bar at will, and aren't in as much of a rush to hit the feeders as they normally are this time of the year.

I see deer to my west through the glare of the sun, and much to my surprise, they are being chased by a mature buck that probably will be a cull buck.  I didn't realized how different the timing of the rut is in Texas compared to both where I live now, in Oklahoma, and where I grew up, in Pennsylvania.  I only took one pic of him, and really wanted an excuse to post it because I got a cardinal in flight with the pic.  Blurry, but that is what you get with my cell phone.

 

[pdk25]

So, as I am enjoying the sunset and watching the deer, I hear something take off behind me and crash into a feeder leg on it's way out.  I am pretty sure that it was a hog, and likely a lone boar since I didn't hear any feeding before that happened.  I don't think that I was winded, and I wasn't moving.  It likely spooked at some strange blade of grass, or something.  

Maybe 10 minutes later, and decent sow went under a barbed wired fence to my North ( I am facing east, into the wind), and headed to the feeder and promptly started chowing down.  She may have weighed 120-130#, but I really wasn't interested in shooting her.  Before long, and decent boar came in to the feeder, likely encouraged by the presence of the sow.  I am pretty sure that it is the same one the spooked early.  I was guessing that he probably weighed 140-150#, and I figured that I would just watch them and see what happened.  I took a bunch of pics of them from my hiding spot, but with it getting dusky and not being able to use the flash, they didn't come out great.  Here is one pic.

 


Now, I know my eyesight isn't what it used to be, but I could have sworn that he had some tan grass sticking out the right side of his mouth, which I thought was odd. It was tough to tell with as much as he was moving around.  What the heck?  It is sticking out the left side to.  Ohhh, I got it.  It's not grass.  Well, I am still not convinced that I want to shoot him.  But just for the heck of it, I am going to see if I can get drawn on him through this brush.  I had limited shooting lanes, because I couldn't trim much of the heavy branches above my head and I needed clearance for the limb tips.  I drew on him a few times, but he never stood still, and at this point I don't think that I want to shoot him. Each time that I draw I keep looking at his cutters.  It is starting to get pretty dark.  Nah, I don't want him.  Decent cutters, though.  Ahhh, the heck with it.  I take a quartering shot, because he is not likely to give me a better one before it gets to dark to shoot. He takes off into the brush to the east, then I see my lit nock take a hard right, then I lose sight of it in the thick cover.  I hit him a few inches behind what would have been ideal, but I am a little below his level, and I figure with the quartering shot, I should have gotten into the goodies.

[Wannabe1]

Outstanding thread and pics!  

[pdk25]

I get on the radio and call to be picked up, thinking that my hog is probably real close.  My flashlight isn't that great, but John shows up with a better one and we start tracking it.  Decent blood at first, and we follow it from where it took a hard right, but there isn't a ton of blood on the ground, just bright, non-bubbly blood on the brush where the hog hit it.  We follow the trail for around 100 yard, but the trail pretty much dried up where I belly crawled under a deadfall looking for it.  We had started to enter some incredibly thick brush, with nothing but pig tunnels in it.  

This ranch has 2 general policies for tracking hogs after dark.  After they have gone over 100  yards, pull out until morning, because there is a good chance that they have gone considerably farther, and no trailing in brush that you have to crawl through after a wounded hog.  A pretty self-explanatory safety issue.  We had met both criteria.  I may have felt differently if more blood on the ground, but we agreed to pull out until morning.  Fortunatly, it was cooling off quickly with a front coming in, and got down into the upper 30's overnight.

Great, a night of second guessing.  How far did the hog go?  Everything happens so fast.  I know that I didn't hit him in the ham.  too much blood for that.  Not bubble, though, so not predominantly lung.  Not dark, so at least arterial.  Anyway, morning came, and John, Rob, Smiley and myself when back to the site of last blood, which I had marked with a cough drop wrapper on a mesquite thorn.  It took about 5 minutes to find the hog.  I think that I had crawled within less than 10 feet of it the night before, but just didn't see it.  I got partial exit hole that got plugged up, fat around the nock end of the arrow shaft sealed it up enough that blood mostly only came out when it hit brush, and the hog flopped over dead on my illuminated nock.  If it flopped on the other sided, it would have been a breeze to find.


   

   

I shot this boar with the same arrow and tigershark that I shot the second javelina with.  Over 400# of hog and a nice javelina so far with that particular broadhead.  The arrow is done, but I still have more plans for the broadhead.

All in all, 3 dead big game animals in one day, and a total of 6 hours of hunting.  That is the best that I have done so far.

[pdk25]

Yes Rick, it is the shorter 1 1/4" vpa head.  They are a little thicker blade and tough as nails.  Maybe not what I would choose for a 300# hog, but great for deer, javelina and turkey so far.

[Alexander Traditional]

Man you are cleaning up! I bought some 175 grain 1.25 off the classifieds. I can't wait until I get to the point that if game presents itself I can hit it every time.

Congrats!

[Margly]

Great story and huntalong      

Thanks for sharing!

[bowhuntingrn]

Great hunt! Thanks for sharing. Glad you made it home safely.

[bowhuntingrn]

Sorry, double post.

[Tater]

Great story and pictures,thanks for sharing.

   Congrats on the Javie and the Hog...!

[Green]

Great hunt.....Congrats!

[bentpole]

Great Story and Hunt Patrick!              Which recurve were you shooting?

[medic77]

To me, there is no better animal to hunt than hogs and Javis.  I have more fun and am more relaxed on those hunts than anything else.  Congrats on 3 great trophies

[cacciatore]

Pat you are adding a lot of Mojo to that beautiful Tip!

[Jerry Russell]

A great hunt and story.  I need to chase those critters.  I have never done it.