Now in my mind I’m thinking about the last thing I said to my wife as I’d walked out the door “will only be a quick walk I’ll be home in a few hours” famous last words.
I’d been watching the moon phases closely the last few nights waiting for the full moon and tonight’s the night. My day had been slow at work with anticipation of tonight’s hunt. Once home from work it was a quick rush to gather all my gear and make sure there was some life in the GPS tracking gear. A few texts where sent to close mates but no one was keen on walking round the scrub at night mid-week with work in morning, so it looked like it was to be me and my one dog Duke.
A message was sent to the farm owner and he said he would come along for a quick walk, least now I’ll have someone to chat to, Dukes not very conversational at the best of times. Once I’d helped my wife get my daughter down for bed & cleaned up the kitchen mess it was time!! Soon as the back door opened and Duke could see me lugging my hunting gear and hear the jingle of his collar I could hear his tail wagging against the side of his kennels. He knew what was going on. I was pretty excited for the hunt as well as quite often I’ve got a mate hunting with me and usually they have a young dog or two so for once it was going to be just the rifle and one main dog. It had been a while since I’d put all faith into just one dog and especially in this area where the pigs are proving hard to catch at the best of times and often with harder dogs. Duke is a pretty soft bailer, As Forest Gump would say “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get” and with Duke bailing this is very true. I can guarantee it will be of the pork variety but he will happily bail a weener for 40min, 1km away, you can imagine how impressed I was after bashing my way through the supple jack and rubbish and finding that situation thinking I was sneaking in on a good boar.
Back to the moonlight hunt. I loaded Duke up into my car and headed off to the farm getting there around 8pm. A quick yarn at the farmer’s house while he chucks on his boots and jacket and we are off. It’s a primo night, the sky is clear and the moon is bright and there is a gentle breeze blowing the right way for once. I walked Duke alongside me up the farm tracks until we hit the top country where I let him run free. Soon as I say he can go he’s off out of sight into the scrub in the moonlight. The farmer soon tells me he reckons he had seen a pig scamper off into the scrub in this area the day prior but could’ve been his eyes playing tricks on him. It hadn’t rained since and had been nice cool days so I was hopeful it was a pig and that Duke would soon pick it up. We carried on along the tracks keeping an eye on where Duke was off to, he was still busy sniffing around and still hadn’t come back to us because he was investigating the nearby gully. We carried on via a track we had cut through the gully and pushed down and up to the ridge on the opposite side as the farmer said there had been a lot of digging along there in the last few weeks. There was some serious digging along the ridge, nice knee deep stuff that you can tell a good boar had done but nothing along there was fresher than a week. Duke was working down the ridge in front of us when he peeled off and headed in the direction of the local pig dump where the breeze was blowing from. Watching on the GPS I said to the farmer that Duke had gone straight past the dump and was heading towards the swampy corner, that area had been a favourite spot for the pigs lately having caught a nice eater from there the weekend prior. Duke knew they liked the area too and was heading straight to it. A few loops of the swampy gully and Duke opened up with the sweet sound of a bail and right out in the open before the swamp scrub. Primo!
We started heading towards the sound of Duke singing away in the moonlight. We got to about 50m away and the farmer asked loudly “how far now?” before I could answer Duke comes bounding over to us. He was looking proud as punch obviously, he was closer than I thought and he clearly heard us coming in. Now I was a bit gutted because Duke came back and I know that pig isn’t going to hang around to see what all that was about. I sool Duke back in and tell him to find the pig. He bounds back off in the direction he came from, I was hopeful he would start barking straight away, but that was wishful thinking because just as I’d thought the pig hadn’t hung around. We watched Duke start tracking off on the GPS. I start pushing down to where I thought the original bail broke out to see if I could smell that boar or see some prints to try get a gauge on the size of this pig and decide whether it’s worth letting duke keep tracking it. I’d say it won’t be that close any more and the GPS soon confirms this as dukes now 700m away tracking through some gnarly gullies on the edge of the pine block. I couldn’t smell that smell that gets most pig hunters noses going and I can’t find any fresh sign or prints in the long grass so at this point the pig could be any bloody size! Now in my mind I’m thinking about the last thing I said to my wife as I’d walked out the door “will only be a quick walk I’ll be home in a few hours” famous last words. Usually I don’t worry about it or pay any attention to it, the wife knows that stuff happens and I’ll be home when I’m home but she wasn’t feeling that flash when I left home so I really was trying to make it a quick walk. Well its already been a few hours and the direction Dukes going I’m thinking I’ve chased this pig before as it’s doing a very familiar track. It usually ends up being a very long day and Duke usually ends up a few km’s away.
Ahhhhhh bugger it! I’ve got to be up for work at 5.30am it’s already 10.30pm. I start to give Duke a whistle and beep on his collar a few times to hopefully get him back before I’m here all bloody night. Watching closely on the GPS Dukes still tracking away, at this point I thought all hope was lost and I really didn’t wanna be here all night. Again, I give him a few more whistles and beeps and even chuck in a few yells of his name for good measure. He starts to slow and changes his direction and is now heading back towards me but slightly off his track he went away on but at least he’s on his way back. A few more whistles and yells to let him know where I am and it looks like he’s on his way back! Relief I won’t be here all night after all!
Duke Carries on his merry way back towards me and gets to the last ridge of pines about 200m away from me. Suddenly the silence of the night is disrupted by the sound of a sweet one dog bail. Me and the farmer look at each other puzzled and I check the GPS and going off Dukes tracks the pig had gone out looped round and was cutting back towards us even with me yelling for Duke most of that time. This time I’m not so fast to move and let the bail settle down. I ask the farmer to stay back and let me get in there and see what we’re dealing with and I’ll either call him in or he will hear a gun shot with any luck. He agrees and I get my jog on down the fence line that leads to the swampy corner, from there Duke and his pig should be pretty close. I get to the corner and can hear Duke bailing away about 50m from me on the first ridge in the pines. I head up the hill slightly as I want to come down on them from above. I make my way over the old rickety fence as quietly as I can and slowly creep into the pitch-black pines. I break open my single shot 44 and load a round in as I keep creeping in. It’s pitch black in there and takes a bit for my eyes to adjust. I take it slowly trying my best to get close without snapping to many branches or using my torch just yet.
I get as close as I dare in the darkness. Duke is bailing away just off to my left a few meters and knowing Duke the pig will be within this 10m area somewhere. He has a real knack of putting no pressure on the pigs and he stands back when he’s bailing. I get a whiff of that smell we pig hunters have all grown to love and all I can hear is the “chomp, chomp, chomp” of Mr boar sharpening his tusks. To my right about 6m away I can make out a big black shape moving slightly on the ridge between some pines. luckily for me the pines along this ridge are very open and there is hardly any of the usual rubbish on the ground either so made for some easy spotting. I ready myself slightly behind a tree and get my torch in one hand and the 44 in the other. I flick on my torch and a quick scan and I can see my target a nice sized black boar. At this very moment, the boar decided he didn’t like me or the torch and starts heading up straight towards me. “BOOM” I can hear the shot echoing out of the gorge below. It wasn’t the most ideal shot but I didn’t have many options with a charging boar coming at me. I aimed straight for the brisket and into the engine room. Much to my surprise he turns and runs off downhill with Duke hot behind him, CRAP! had I missed? Duke soon opens up bailing again 30m further down the hill, either way this boar has still got plenty life left and I’ve only got one more bullet so I’d best make it count. I keep my torch on now and sneak down to where Dukes got him bailed it’s through a tight scrubby wee gut & I soon spot the boar backed into a pine tree half way up the other side, he stood there chomping away still. Dukes just out in front giving me the verbal hurry up and finish this off. I cut through the gut and make my way up the game trail that leads to the tree the boars backed into. Not the most ideal approach but it’s all I had to work with at the time. Just as I get within 5m the boar turns his attention to me. We have a brief stare off, Duke makes a bit more excitement out front to grab the boar’s attention back again. Now’s my chance I line the 44 up with his head and pull the trigger, “BOOM” another echoing shot rings out and I see the boar drop like a sack of spuds and roll over and start kicking. With his last kick he manages to turn and push himself down a steep wee gut and go down into the thick scrub just to make my life that little more difficult in the coming minutes.
I drop the gun down and run in and grab a kicking back leg and stop him sliding any further down into the scrub. Now I only have two arms like most and unfortunately, I’m hunting with a hand-held torch so that gets chucked into the scrub close by. With a fair struggle in the dark I manage to roll the boar over and find my knife and stick him and hang on until he stopped kicking. I reach around and grab my torch back and call Duke over for a quick pat and check over, no rips or anything so that’s a positive. I reach down the boar to pull his head out of the scrub to check out what kind of ivory he has. I was aiming to grab his ear to pull on but to my shock there isn’t one there at all, it’s completely smooth just a tiny hole is all that’s left. I reach down to his snout and pull the head from the scrub to find a very respectable jaw and see he’s quite a mature pig. I look to the other side of his head and again there is next to no ear left, only a small stump remains. Poor buggers obviously had quite a hard life and been in a few battles and clearly won in the past with the scars to prove it.
I call out for the farmer and he’s made his way down after he heard the first gun shot and was just up above me. He climbs down and gives me a hand to hold the boar still while I gut it out and clean it up. I have a quick check over the boar and try find where I shot him , sure enough there is an entry hole in the brisket and out behind the front shoulder, it hit everything it needed to but he obviously wasn’t going to give up that easy. The second shot was right where I’d put it just behind his eye in the top of his head. We grab a back leg each and start the drag up off this steep face, 3, 2, 1, heave … we move the boar about a meter. We both climb up a little more and get a good footing and again we move the boar another meter. We keep repeating this until we get the boar up to the tree where I put that final shot into him. It’s clear enough here to tie him up into a back pack to carry the rest of the way back to a track we can get a ute too.
Once I get the boar up onto my back I get a feel for his weight and start the climb back up and out to the open farm land. It takes a good 40min to get the boar to a spot on the track we can get a ute to. The boars unloaded from my back and we walk all the way back down to the farm house to grab the farmers ute. We then drive all the way back up to the boar on the track and load him onto the ute. We head back down to the garage and hang him up and weigh him. He pulls the digital scales to a respectable 123lb I was stoked! For this area that’s a good size boar.
Still to this day I feel the only reason I caught that boar was because I only had the one dog there. That boar was only stood there because of the lack of pressure Duke was putting on him and I’m sure the boar was waiting for the rest of the other dogs to turn up like normal for a big punch up, but they never came and he got a surprise when he seen me creep in and finish him off with the trusty 44mag.
George Bright