By Luke Clayton
I think my love affair for hunting wild hogs began when I was a boy growing up in very rural Red River County in the northeast corner of Dallas. With the Red and Sulphur Rivers close by, the area was a haven for wild hogs, even back in the late fifties and sixties when I was growing up. Wild porkers were not nearly as plentiful back then as they are today but a few guys with hog dogs hunted them along the rivers. I remember watching the movie “Home from the Hill”, filmed a short drive from our farm, this old classic with Robert Mitchum as the lead actor portrayed a young boy growing into manhood with a very demanding father. A scene in the movie was the young man standing the charge of an enraged boar in the river bottom with his Winchester lever action rifle. Later in life I had the privilege of hunting boar on the ranch where the movie was filmed. I learned the boar used in the movie was actually trapped on the ranch.
My father raised a few hogs on our farm each year, most of them were sold but he butchered a couple each year for our winter’s supply of meat. As a result of my passion for one day hunting wild hogs fueled by the movie and my love of tasty pork barbeque, I was elated back 40 years ago when the wild hog numbers began to explode and hunting opportunities began to abound in Texas. Today their numbers have increased to several million, some reports are 3.5 million wild porkers and some twice that many. But given the fact that sows can breed at 6 months of age the true number could be twice the estimates. The truth is nobody really knows how many wild hogs roam the Texas landscape but I know for a fact there are plenty. I am fortunate to live in Kaufman County, about 30 miles southeast of Texas in what I refer to as “Hog Central”. Our home is situated between a big 15,000 acre cattle ranch and a 2,000 acre wetland. A long strip of woodland connects the two and I am fortunate to have neighbors that allow me to hunt this natural runway for not only hogs but deer as well. The Trinity River is a few miles to the west and the East Fork of the Trinity runs it serpentine course just to the east. One could search the state and it would be difficult to find a better area to collect wild pork.
During the course of a year, I will shoot fifteen or twenty wild porker, definitely not enough to be considered ‘hog control’ but plenty to supply meat for my passion of cooking wild game for myself and friends. While I have absolutely no problem with any form of ‘hog control’ such as night hunting with AR style rifles equipped with thermal scopes, I prefer to target one hog at a time and before I pull the trigger or release my arrow, I have done a quick assessment of the animal. I usually pass up shots on the bigger boar and target ‘meat hogs’ weighting between 50 and 125 pounds. I often have a dish I want to prepare in mind before the hunt and consider my early evening sets watching a corn feeder or stalking close to a sounder of hogs a shopping trip to the local meat market in the wilds!
Hogs are mostly nocturnal, as a general rule they move best in the twilight hours just before dark until a few hours after dark. Oh, it’s not uncommon to catch them up and moving on a cool, cloudy day during daylight hours but through my more than fifty years hunting wild porkers, I can honestly say that 80 percent of my harvests have been a few minutes before darkness or on a pitch black night using green lights back in the day and my AGM Global Vision thermal scopes the past few years.
As a full time outdoors writer with a passion for hunting wild hogs, I have had the opportunity to hunt them with everything from muzzleloaders to compound and crossbows to center fire rifles and just about everything between. About a decade ago, I became interested in hunting with big bore air rifles and as hunting editor for a magazine devoted to air rifles, I’ve shot and hunted with many different models. Some big bores pressure up to 4,500 psi and offer only a couple of very potent shots. Others pressure to 3,000 and provide plenty of power to cleanly harvest hogs and deer size animals.
Recently I got a ‘hankering’ for a big pot of hickory smoked wild pork chili and decided to check the zero on my Seneca 50 caliber Dragon Claw II air rifle topped with an AGM Global Vision TS19 Rattler thermal scope. The Dragon Claw is a tried and proven air rifle that pressures up to 3,000 psi and loaded with a 336 grain lead slug, develops around 330 foot pounds of energy, plenty to cleanly harvest any hog in the woods at reasonable ranges. The rifle also shoots air bolts but I prefer shooting ‘bullets’ through it. That’s just me, many hunters use the rifle for propelling bolts (arrows) tipped with broad heads. I’ve found the rifle to me very accurate and plenty of medicine for deer/hog size game out to about 60 yards. Since most of my hog hunting is over a corn feeder or stalking, the rifle’s effective range is perfect for my style of hunting. The rifle and thermal scope are what I consider to be not only prefect for my style of hunting but one of the best buys available. The Dragon Claw sells for a bit over $700 through Pyramyd Air www.pyramydair.com and the TS 19 Rattler is a bit over $800. While there are much more expensive air rifles and thermal scopes available, I’ve found this budget friendly set up to perfectly suit my needs.
My hunt took place in early September, a month or so ago and it was still plenty warm in Texas, mosquitoes were a major problem. But I had devised a plan to remain comfortable in the bed of my pickup, setting in a comfortable swivel office chair with some ice cold green tea to sip on. I had used a machete to hack out a spot to pull the truck into some heavy brush about 50 yards downwind from a corn feeder the hogs had been coming to on a very regular basis, usually within a couple hours of dark each evening.
I like to get set up for a night hunt about sunset. With the truck pulled into the heavy cover, I adjusted my shooting sticks to the perfect height, popped the top on an ice cold bottle of tea, fired my Thermocell up and settled in for a peaceful set in the middle of a pecan grove on my buddy’s ranch located about a mile from home. Squirrels had been feasting on green pecans and there was plenty on the ground. I probably could have done a stalk hunt and walked within shooting range of porkers feeding on the fallen pecans but my odds were better with this comfortable truck hunt near the feeder! I felt pretty confident I would have an opportunity to harvest a hog and had packed 20 pounds of ice in my cooler so I could quickly chill the fresh pork should I be successful.
As is often the case, coyotes opened up across the slough west of me just as the sun disappeared below the horizon. I could hear a couple of packs but they sounded a good ways off. Nothing disrupts a hog hunt like coyotes. They too love pork and in our area, I believe young pigs have become a mainstay of the yotes diet. I had found the remains of a small pig near the feeder a few days before, the meal of an ambushing coyote, I’m sure. About an hour after dark, I heard rustling in the brush alongside the truck and put my AGM Global Vision Taipan thermal monocular up to discover 4 raccoons making their way to the feeder and golden kernels below. While some hog hunters dislike having raccoons around, I’ve watched hogs follow the scent trails of raccoons many times to a corn feeder. This was to be a very easy, early hog hunt. Within minutes of the arrival of the raccoons, I heard sticks breaking off to my right and the occasional grunts of pigs as a mixed sounder of a couple of boars, two sows and an assortment of pigs wound their way through the pecan grove, obviously in route to the feeder. I settled the crosshairs of the Rattler on the center of the neck of a fat little gilt (young sow) and sent the big 336 grain chunk of lead on its way. My chili meat kicked once and I crawled out of the bed of the truck to put my new Weishuhn’s Whitetail Signature knife to work (available at www.vineyardmax.net).
Rather than field dress and actually open a wild hog up, I remove the 4 quarters, hide on in the field and split the hide down the top of the back to remove the backstraps. With the meat on ice, I made the short drive home to running water and lights and soon had the meat chilling in freezer bags in the cooler. The next morning, my fresh pork was in my Smokin Tex electric smoker (www.smokintex.com), slow smoking with dry pecan wood for several hours. I later used my little meat cleaver to turn the smoked pork into rough chopped chili meat. I know that coming from an old Texan many will think it sacrilegious but I added a can of kidney beans to my chili. YES! It was tasty topped with chopped green onions, cheddar cheese and crackers. May this lifestyle go on forever!
Signed copies of “Poor Man’s Grizzly”, A newly released book all about hog hunting by Larry Weishuhn and Luke Clayton is available at www.larryweishuhn.net and www.catfishradio.org.