mftkoehler
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- Jun 11, 2009
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I finally got off my butt and did it, and I'd like to thank all those of you who post information here for being a pretty darn good introduction to hog hunting. By way of warning, I tell long stories. If you're only interested in how the story ends 
pig-laughing:!), skip the first two thirds.
I'll start out with a bit of an introduction. I'm actually a first time hunter who had never even fired a gun until a few months ago. My father was born in Germany and used to hunt, but he got rid of his guns when he started a family. He used to tell us hunting stories occasionally, but my general impression was that hunting was something exotic which you did when growing up on a farm in a foreign country, not in suburban Chicago.
So how did I come to hunt? Oddly, vegetarians made me do it. I went to college and then graduate school surrounded by vegetarians. I even married one, although she has since started eating meat again. My vegetarian friends would now and again challenge me to justify my meat eating, to which my stock reply was, "It's tasty." Although I felt pretty sure that I wanted to continue eating meat, I also knew that I knew next to nothing about how my meat was produced. Over the years, I've read books and articles on the subject and come to the conclusion that our current system is completely insane, and that I wanted to participate in it as little as possible. Two very entertaining books (really!) on this subject are Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser.
Knowing the downsides, I wanted to get away from commercial meat, and I also had always had the nagging sense that if you're going to eat something, you should be man enough to do the killing yourself. What's a guy to do? Go hunting. Michael Pollan obviously felt the same way, and he goes hog hunting in one section of his book.
As you all know, that's easier said than done. So I jumped through California's various hoops for a hunting license, gun ownership and the lot. I read up on where to hunt and with whom. I read the stories of others' hunts here to see what I was getting myself into. Finally, I called up Frank Morasci and told him I'd like to hunt with him this past Thursday.
I got up in the middle of the night, and met Frank in King City. We hightailed it down to one of his properties and he set me up in an ambush overlooking a trail the hogs use to return to their beds from a neighboring barley fields. As the light came up, I took up a spot on a grassy overlook smelling very strongly of hay and waited.
As an aside, I read a lot of hunting stories and no one really mentioned listening for hogs, but that was, for me, one of the very best ways to find them. The hogs seem to grunt to themselves every few steps, and they aren't all that quiet about it. Every hog that I spotted yesterday I heard long before I saw it. Maybe the long time hunters are deaf from the shotgun blasts?
Anyway, one portly porker grunted her way down the path, just where Frank had predicted, just as the light came up. Unfortunately for me, she was in a clearing across the canyon. When I put the scope on her, I felt like I could hit her, but I couldn't be sure of a clean kill. Since she was still headed my way, I decided to hold off a bit. She descended into the oak trees that cover the hillside, but as she moved into range, she was under tree cover pretty much the whole way. I could follow her progress by her grunts and the occasional glimpse through the trees. I tried to move around to a spot with a better view of where she would exit the trees, but never saw her again.
The rest of the early morning was pretty uneventful. Two more pigs wandered by, but took another fork up the canyon, and never passed close to me. As the sun rose, a very slight breeze had picked up behind me, and may have been tipping the hogs off that there were problems ahead. Or maybe they just decided to go another way. By now, Frank had left me to attend to his day job, so I decided to move to where the wind would not give me away. I set out cross country, circling around the cut through which the hogs were coming. After a fair bit of climbing, I had a great vantage point and the wind in my face again, but no hogs came by. Knowing that Frank was due back in a bit, I decided to head through an area he had described as having lots of pig beds.
As I ducked and scratched my way through the low brush and oak trees, roughly following a pig trail, I started to hear them again. I stopped frequently to listen, but heard mostly the grunt of pigs hightailing it away from me. One I actually got a pretty good bead on as he trotted away, but the one time I actually saw him, he was about 100 yards away and showing me only his posterior. He stopped for a moment to give me a disparaging look, then disappeared down the canyon. About that time, Frank checked in and asked me to walk out the canyon to his truck.
Suddenly, I heard a "Whoa!" through the radio. "A big boar just came right by me on the road!" he said.
"Black with a white stripe around the middle?" I asked.
"Yeah," said Frank. "How'd you know?"
"I just chased him from his bed," I said. "Never got a shot at anything but his ass."
As it turns out, I had gotten ahead of myself and Frank's planning as well. His usual sequence of events is to ambush the hogs coming back from the barley in the morning, and failing that, to put the hunter at the entrance to the canyon (where his truck was) and then he chases them out of their beds. Whoops.
After that, we went on a drive, checking various bedding spots around the property while Frank told me hunting stories. His stories, while quite funny, also convey the dos and don'ts of hunting with Frank. This may be unintentional, but here is what I gleaned from several of the stories:
1. An unnamed hunter is posted next to the truck. Frank rousts sixteen or so hogs out of their beds and they run by the guy at point blank range. He has his gun up, but never fires. Frank asks him, "What happened?" The hunter replies, "I was waiting for them to stop!" Frank's reply: "They never stop." The lesson? Shoot when you get a decent chance. It will likely not get better.
2. At one point Frank pointed across a canyon to an open field beyond. "One of my guys shot a big hog all the way across there. It was a 600 yard shot." I took him to mean that I should blaze away even if a miss was probable.
3. A final unnamed hunter, this time a guy who has lost an arm and a leg (!) is posted at the exit of a canyon while Frank rousts hogs his way. The guy, who was bowhunting (!!) has a sow run right by him, unleashes an arrow, but misses cleanly. He's pissed, but keeps his head, and, not two minutes later, a big trophy boar comes trotting out of the canyon, and is plugged by our intrepid hunter, who uses his teeth to draw and release the bowstring (!!!). The lesson? Hang tough and don't get discouraged.
Anyway, after making the rounds from the truck, Frank decided that I would have to work for my hog. He drove me up to a spot just below a ridge line and told me to walk around, keeping just below the ridge. "Lots of beds here," he said. "I dropped a fella off here and he shot a hog in the first five minutes once."
I heeded Frank's advice, walking carefully along some pig trails just below the ridge. The hillside was quite steep, but was more open than the other beds I'd wandered through. The wind was blowing gently in my face, and within 200 yards, I heard some hogs startle, grunt and start to move off. I froze, crouching low to see where the sound was coming from. The hogs didn't seem to be moving fast, and things settled down again after a minute. I remained quiet and kept looking around.
Another grunt drew me to look a little further along the trail I was following. There was some movement there, and then I saw a black snout, about 40 yards away, sniffing the air and shuffling nervously. I sat down very quietly and waited. I had a shooting lane into this bed, but it was narrow, and I had to shoot under an overhanging tree branch. The sow I was looking at was covered by the branch at the moment, but she was moving. I eased the safety off and watched her. She remained in cover, but I saw a few littler pigs and some other adults moving around in the bed. I clearly only had a shot at the sow nearest me.
Watching through my scope, I settled into a steady sitting position and kept the crosshairs on the opening I could shoot through. Now the sow shook her head a bit and took a step or two forward to give me a front view of her head and chest, quartering slightly toward me.
Wham! My shot surprised me with its suddenness. Usually at the range, it takes me a few seconds to settle in and be sure of my shot, but this was at close range and I didn't want to miss my opportunity. I heard a slap and a squeal and pigs exploded out of the bed in every direction. As I got my head up from my scope, I didn't see the pig I'd shot at, but I heard squealing and the pig rolling down the hill. I took a moment to collect my thoughts and went after the sound.
My first reaction was confusion. The source of the squealing was a little pig, maybe 40 pounds. And she had been messily gutshot. She was leaning against a tree about 20 yards downhill, kicking weakly. Not understanding what had happened, I finished the job with a quick headshot and then tried to calm down and take stock. This was definitely not the pig I had tried to shoot and even if it were, I couldn't have possibly hit it through the guts as this one had been. In a bit of a daze, I tried to decide what to do. Knowing I was close to the trailhead, I decided to drag this pig back to my starting point.
It was hot work getting the pig back to the road uphill and through the brush, but about 15 minutes later I was there. It was only then that I thought that I should really have tried to gut the pig in the woods. Oh well. Having never gutted a pig, I gave it a shot. I knew roughly what I was supposed to do, but when I did open up the belly, I wasn't sure how many membranes to cut through, and I couldn't figure out how to finish the job cleanly. I decided to wait for help rather than make an already messy abdomen worse.
In looking more closely at the pig, however, I began to understand what might have happened. There were now two entrance wounds on the pig. My finishing shot, below the chin, went in about the size of a pencil, with a much larger exit wound at the back of the head. The original gut shot, however, was about the same size on both sides of the pig. It went in about the size of a thumb and out about the same size. It dawned on me that the wound had likely been caused by an already expanded bullet. Which meant that I probably did hit the sow I was aiming at originally, and it meant that she might still be out there.
It had been about half an hour since I encountered the pigs, but I rapidly found the bed where they had been. There wasn't much evidence of blood where I had shot the pigs originally, and there wasn't even much where the little pig had died. I started to search around, looking for the missing sow or some evidence that she had been hit. I didn't find anything, and when Frank returned, we both scoured the area for another 45 minutes or so, walking the area that she might have run to. Unfortunately, with the hillside being so steep, we had to search both where she might have started as well as places where she might have rolled downhill. This was a huge area, even if we assumed that my shot had been good enough to stop her within a few hundred yards.
I finished my search for the missing sow by walking down the ravine I judged most likely to be the one she ended up in, but after zigzagging downhill for about a half mile, I had nothing to show for my efforts but sore feet. Frank picked me up at the county road having struck out as well. When I looked back up at the ridgeline, two turkey vultures were slowly circling in the thermals.
Frank and I made one more play to, "upgrade my hog", as he put it, but the hogs he drove out of their beds headed off in an unexpected direction away from me. We headed back down to the oilfields to skin my hog and head out.
Overall, I was obviously disappointed that I wasn't able to find the sow that I had shot at. Did I miss her? I'm grown up enough to admit to myself when I've screwed something up, but I really am convinced that my first shot was good. The range was so close and my hold and sight picture so good that I can't imagine that I missed completely. In running through things in my head after the fact, I wonder if I didn't aim a bit high on the chest. At that close range, the bullet might have been an inch or so above my scope's aiming point too. Put them together and I might have not hit the heart. I think the entrance wound on the pig I did find argues that I hit her hard enough to expand the bullet (a 165 grain Barnes TSX in .30-06).
My big mistake, in retrospect, was to assume that all was OK when I heard something roll downhill. I should have moved in more quickly to follow up if needed. If there had been someone with me to watch the shot, they might have realized too that I hadn't dropped the sow quickly enough. Just something to do better the next time out. I'll let you know how the meat and sausage turn out.
pig-laughing:!), skip the first two thirds.I'll start out with a bit of an introduction. I'm actually a first time hunter who had never even fired a gun until a few months ago. My father was born in Germany and used to hunt, but he got rid of his guns when he started a family. He used to tell us hunting stories occasionally, but my general impression was that hunting was something exotic which you did when growing up on a farm in a foreign country, not in suburban Chicago.
So how did I come to hunt? Oddly, vegetarians made me do it. I went to college and then graduate school surrounded by vegetarians. I even married one, although she has since started eating meat again. My vegetarian friends would now and again challenge me to justify my meat eating, to which my stock reply was, "It's tasty." Although I felt pretty sure that I wanted to continue eating meat, I also knew that I knew next to nothing about how my meat was produced. Over the years, I've read books and articles on the subject and come to the conclusion that our current system is completely insane, and that I wanted to participate in it as little as possible. Two very entertaining books (really!) on this subject are Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser.
Knowing the downsides, I wanted to get away from commercial meat, and I also had always had the nagging sense that if you're going to eat something, you should be man enough to do the killing yourself. What's a guy to do? Go hunting. Michael Pollan obviously felt the same way, and he goes hog hunting in one section of his book.
As you all know, that's easier said than done. So I jumped through California's various hoops for a hunting license, gun ownership and the lot. I read up on where to hunt and with whom. I read the stories of others' hunts here to see what I was getting myself into. Finally, I called up Frank Morasci and told him I'd like to hunt with him this past Thursday.
I got up in the middle of the night, and met Frank in King City. We hightailed it down to one of his properties and he set me up in an ambush overlooking a trail the hogs use to return to their beds from a neighboring barley fields. As the light came up, I took up a spot on a grassy overlook smelling very strongly of hay and waited.
As an aside, I read a lot of hunting stories and no one really mentioned listening for hogs, but that was, for me, one of the very best ways to find them. The hogs seem to grunt to themselves every few steps, and they aren't all that quiet about it. Every hog that I spotted yesterday I heard long before I saw it. Maybe the long time hunters are deaf from the shotgun blasts?
Anyway, one portly porker grunted her way down the path, just where Frank had predicted, just as the light came up. Unfortunately for me, she was in a clearing across the canyon. When I put the scope on her, I felt like I could hit her, but I couldn't be sure of a clean kill. Since she was still headed my way, I decided to hold off a bit. She descended into the oak trees that cover the hillside, but as she moved into range, she was under tree cover pretty much the whole way. I could follow her progress by her grunts and the occasional glimpse through the trees. I tried to move around to a spot with a better view of where she would exit the trees, but never saw her again.
The rest of the early morning was pretty uneventful. Two more pigs wandered by, but took another fork up the canyon, and never passed close to me. As the sun rose, a very slight breeze had picked up behind me, and may have been tipping the hogs off that there were problems ahead. Or maybe they just decided to go another way. By now, Frank had left me to attend to his day job, so I decided to move to where the wind would not give me away. I set out cross country, circling around the cut through which the hogs were coming. After a fair bit of climbing, I had a great vantage point and the wind in my face again, but no hogs came by. Knowing that Frank was due back in a bit, I decided to head through an area he had described as having lots of pig beds.
As I ducked and scratched my way through the low brush and oak trees, roughly following a pig trail, I started to hear them again. I stopped frequently to listen, but heard mostly the grunt of pigs hightailing it away from me. One I actually got a pretty good bead on as he trotted away, but the one time I actually saw him, he was about 100 yards away and showing me only his posterior. He stopped for a moment to give me a disparaging look, then disappeared down the canyon. About that time, Frank checked in and asked me to walk out the canyon to his truck.
Suddenly, I heard a "Whoa!" through the radio. "A big boar just came right by me on the road!" he said.
"Black with a white stripe around the middle?" I asked.
"Yeah," said Frank. "How'd you know?"
"I just chased him from his bed," I said. "Never got a shot at anything but his ass."
As it turns out, I had gotten ahead of myself and Frank's planning as well. His usual sequence of events is to ambush the hogs coming back from the barley in the morning, and failing that, to put the hunter at the entrance to the canyon (where his truck was) and then he chases them out of their beds. Whoops.
After that, we went on a drive, checking various bedding spots around the property while Frank told me hunting stories. His stories, while quite funny, also convey the dos and don'ts of hunting with Frank. This may be unintentional, but here is what I gleaned from several of the stories:
1. An unnamed hunter is posted next to the truck. Frank rousts sixteen or so hogs out of their beds and they run by the guy at point blank range. He has his gun up, but never fires. Frank asks him, "What happened?" The hunter replies, "I was waiting for them to stop!" Frank's reply: "They never stop." The lesson? Shoot when you get a decent chance. It will likely not get better.
2. At one point Frank pointed across a canyon to an open field beyond. "One of my guys shot a big hog all the way across there. It was a 600 yard shot." I took him to mean that I should blaze away even if a miss was probable.
3. A final unnamed hunter, this time a guy who has lost an arm and a leg (!) is posted at the exit of a canyon while Frank rousts hogs his way. The guy, who was bowhunting (!!) has a sow run right by him, unleashes an arrow, but misses cleanly. He's pissed, but keeps his head, and, not two minutes later, a big trophy boar comes trotting out of the canyon, and is plugged by our intrepid hunter, who uses his teeth to draw and release the bowstring (!!!). The lesson? Hang tough and don't get discouraged.
Anyway, after making the rounds from the truck, Frank decided that I would have to work for my hog. He drove me up to a spot just below a ridge line and told me to walk around, keeping just below the ridge. "Lots of beds here," he said. "I dropped a fella off here and he shot a hog in the first five minutes once."
I heeded Frank's advice, walking carefully along some pig trails just below the ridge. The hillside was quite steep, but was more open than the other beds I'd wandered through. The wind was blowing gently in my face, and within 200 yards, I heard some hogs startle, grunt and start to move off. I froze, crouching low to see where the sound was coming from. The hogs didn't seem to be moving fast, and things settled down again after a minute. I remained quiet and kept looking around.
Another grunt drew me to look a little further along the trail I was following. There was some movement there, and then I saw a black snout, about 40 yards away, sniffing the air and shuffling nervously. I sat down very quietly and waited. I had a shooting lane into this bed, but it was narrow, and I had to shoot under an overhanging tree branch. The sow I was looking at was covered by the branch at the moment, but she was moving. I eased the safety off and watched her. She remained in cover, but I saw a few littler pigs and some other adults moving around in the bed. I clearly only had a shot at the sow nearest me.
Watching through my scope, I settled into a steady sitting position and kept the crosshairs on the opening I could shoot through. Now the sow shook her head a bit and took a step or two forward to give me a front view of her head and chest, quartering slightly toward me.
Wham! My shot surprised me with its suddenness. Usually at the range, it takes me a few seconds to settle in and be sure of my shot, but this was at close range and I didn't want to miss my opportunity. I heard a slap and a squeal and pigs exploded out of the bed in every direction. As I got my head up from my scope, I didn't see the pig I'd shot at, but I heard squealing and the pig rolling down the hill. I took a moment to collect my thoughts and went after the sound.
My first reaction was confusion. The source of the squealing was a little pig, maybe 40 pounds. And she had been messily gutshot. She was leaning against a tree about 20 yards downhill, kicking weakly. Not understanding what had happened, I finished the job with a quick headshot and then tried to calm down and take stock. This was definitely not the pig I had tried to shoot and even if it were, I couldn't have possibly hit it through the guts as this one had been. In a bit of a daze, I tried to decide what to do. Knowing I was close to the trailhead, I decided to drag this pig back to my starting point.
It was hot work getting the pig back to the road uphill and through the brush, but about 15 minutes later I was there. It was only then that I thought that I should really have tried to gut the pig in the woods. Oh well. Having never gutted a pig, I gave it a shot. I knew roughly what I was supposed to do, but when I did open up the belly, I wasn't sure how many membranes to cut through, and I couldn't figure out how to finish the job cleanly. I decided to wait for help rather than make an already messy abdomen worse.
In looking more closely at the pig, however, I began to understand what might have happened. There were now two entrance wounds on the pig. My finishing shot, below the chin, went in about the size of a pencil, with a much larger exit wound at the back of the head. The original gut shot, however, was about the same size on both sides of the pig. It went in about the size of a thumb and out about the same size. It dawned on me that the wound had likely been caused by an already expanded bullet. Which meant that I probably did hit the sow I was aiming at originally, and it meant that she might still be out there.
It had been about half an hour since I encountered the pigs, but I rapidly found the bed where they had been. There wasn't much evidence of blood where I had shot the pigs originally, and there wasn't even much where the little pig had died. I started to search around, looking for the missing sow or some evidence that she had been hit. I didn't find anything, and when Frank returned, we both scoured the area for another 45 minutes or so, walking the area that she might have run to. Unfortunately, with the hillside being so steep, we had to search both where she might have started as well as places where she might have rolled downhill. This was a huge area, even if we assumed that my shot had been good enough to stop her within a few hundred yards.
I finished my search for the missing sow by walking down the ravine I judged most likely to be the one she ended up in, but after zigzagging downhill for about a half mile, I had nothing to show for my efforts but sore feet. Frank picked me up at the county road having struck out as well. When I looked back up at the ridgeline, two turkey vultures were slowly circling in the thermals.
Frank and I made one more play to, "upgrade my hog", as he put it, but the hogs he drove out of their beds headed off in an unexpected direction away from me. We headed back down to the oilfields to skin my hog and head out.
Overall, I was obviously disappointed that I wasn't able to find the sow that I had shot at. Did I miss her? I'm grown up enough to admit to myself when I've screwed something up, but I really am convinced that my first shot was good. The range was so close and my hold and sight picture so good that I can't imagine that I missed completely. In running through things in my head after the fact, I wonder if I didn't aim a bit high on the chest. At that close range, the bullet might have been an inch or so above my scope's aiming point too. Put them together and I might have not hit the heart. I think the entrance wound on the pig I did find argues that I hit her hard enough to expand the bullet (a 165 grain Barnes TSX in .30-06).
My big mistake, in retrospect, was to assume that all was OK when I heard something roll downhill. I should have moved in more quickly to follow up if needed. If there had been someone with me to watch the shot, they might have realized too that I hadn't dropped the sow quickly enough. Just something to do better the next time out. I'll let you know how the meat and sausage turn out.
