(Author's Note: 1. This is a long read that tends to wander. It isn't always about hog hunting. Recommend to not start reading until you have some time to read it casually. 2. I can spell fine but can't type worth beans. Jesse's Hunting only allows edits for a few minutes. So I apologize ahead of time for typos and errors/omissions.)
Twice Upon a Time fate pushed away the clouds which usually obscure the enlightened path to California wild boar hunting and I was granted access to private, absolutely happening hog land. I did not shy away from the opportunities.
As these things go, they do not last forever. After a few years someone dies, the step kids get control of the property and the rug is swept out from under you. Or someone sells some parcels key to the hunting access, the new owners do not agree to hunting (they prioritize growing marijuana in a fiberglass greenhouse, pre-marijuana legalization law days, above your desire to hunt) and you begin to understand from conversations with new owners, one after another, that the deal is no longer the deal.
BUT while I had access I took full advantage. The second opportunity mentioned above was massive. I had full access to an area about 2.5 - 3 miles x about 2 miles or so. Well over 3000 acres. Probably closer to 4000 acres. The first year I spent figuring the place out. This meant hucking the hills, looking for tracks, signs, figuring out which water holes they were using (all of them was the answer), driving around, glassing and trying different spots at first light or last light or both. I finally got the puzzle reduced to a few likely hotspots. It was then that I decided to bring my dog, Emma, who was a golden retriever-German Shepherd mix.
The only problem with this idea was that Emma was not a hunting dog. Not at all; she was a lover, a healer. If you have read my other stories you will know that there was a reason for tears around our house. Like all dogs, Emma was sent directly from heaven and her job was to unselfishly help carry the burden of those tears. She could read your soul and knew exactly when to come close and put her head on your knee or snuggle in. She was a constant companion.
In fact the way we even got her was, well a little miraculous and you may not believe me. You see, when my boy was still here he and I had often discussed getting a dog. We went back and forth about what kind. He wanted to get a golden retriever and I wanted a German Shepherd (GSD). We kept dreaming about it and haggling and going over pros and cons. We never made a decision.
About 6 months after my boy's address changed to one not of this realm, my wife, who is my boy's step-mom, knew that something had to change and she started looking for a dog for me. She was looking for a German Shepherd. Of course I was not aware of this. Then one day I looked up and walking across the strawberry field in front of the house was a big beautiful golden retriever. She got to the edge of the field and walked right up to me. She was very friendly. I had never seen her before but knew she must live nearby. It was very dangerous for her if she got down by the road and she would get killed for sure if she wandered the additional 75 yards down the driveway and got there.
So I put her in my kitchen, took her picture, closed the doors and went knocking on doors to see who was missing a golden retriever. Our place was at 6 o'clock in this valley and the first house I went to was at 7 o'clock. I knocked on the door, showed a picture of the dog and moved on if it was not the right place. Of course the actual house where the dog lived was at 3 o'clock, the opposite direction of where I had started. And when I showed the guy there the dog's picture, he hung his head and said, yeah, it was his. And she was an escape artist. I gladly went home, retrieved Maxine the beautiful big golden retriever, and drove her back home. She lived across three fields from me up on a side hill across the valley.
A week later I see Maxine coming across the strawberry field again, only this time she has a companion, a small puppy. They walked right into my yard and came right up to me. I said hello to Maxine and her fat little brown puppy, loaded them up in my truck and took them home. The owner's shame deepened and he apologized more than he needed to. He also explained that Maxine had a litter of puppies and did I want one. I said no thank you and bid farewell.
A few days later I look up and here is Maxine coming across the field again with a puppy. Only this one was all black and not as fat. They came right up to me and I said hello as before and then loaded them up and took them home. The owner explained how Maxine had got out so many times that he owed the County a bunch of money and would I please take a puppy. I was not interested but I did learn that the dad of those pups lived a few houses down the hill and was a very expensive German Shepherd imported from out of state who himself had escaped once and had gone philandering; hence the puppies.
A few days later I look up and here comes Maxine across the strawberry field again. I could see that she also had a puppy with her. I went out to greet these visitors and as they were jogging up to me I looked at the puppy and it looked exactly like a German Shepherd. It's coloring was brown and black where a GSD's is. Its ears were floppy, not erect, but her colorings were 100% GSD. As it got closer I realized that I was looking at a perfect mix of a German Shepherd and a golden retriever running right at me. I squatted down and this dog ran right up into my lap, reached up and licked my face.
Well hello, I said. I sat there kind of dumbfounded as this cute little puppy loved on me like it knew me all its life. Maxine had brought me one puppy, then another and then a third. But only on seeing the marking of the third did I put together that these puppies were the exact compromise/synthesis between the two breeds my boy and I had talked about getting.
I took the dogs back to the owner only this time took him up on his offer to take a puppy. We took the little GSD-marked golden retriever with floppy ears back home and named her Emma after a girl my boy had a secret crush on at one point.
Emma was the best. She fit right in immediately. We went on daily walks multiple times a day. She saw me cry and stood between my legs, just being close or crawled in my lap and licked tears. A few months later I got this strange email. Hello, do you remember me? It was Jane, a friend I had known in high school. She was two years younger and had primarily dated a guy in my class for most of high school. I didn't know anything about her post high school trajectory and had not seen her since the summer after my senior year. She said she was living in a midwestern state, married to a doctor but had to tell me something. I have no idea how she even got my email address. But she had hunted me down because of the urgency. She said I would probably think she was a kook but she didn't care. She had heard I lost my son. And that a few days before speaking to me she had had a dream. She said she dreamed she saw my son standing in a field eating a strawberry and that he had a dog with him. She did not know what my son looked like but symbolically she knew it to be him. That was it. I could think she was crazy if I wanted to but she felt compelled to tell me. She said she didn't know what it meant and that I could do with it whatever I wanted to. Have a nice life, I did my part, good bye.
Well I was stunned. I told my wife and we both wondered what kind of stuff was this? I mean, I am a slow learner but even I was starting to read the signs...strawberry, field, a dog, my boy. When I had seen Emma running toward me on that first day and realized a GSD-golden retriever mix was coming right at me I thought it was a mighty convenient coincidence. But when Jane told me about the powerful dream she had to urgently tell me or not be able to live with herself, I just knew that this dog was a very special, personal gift being given to me specifically and directly.
How could I help but to not believe that my boy was somehow involved in the giving end? Wouldn't you believe that? It was custom picked just for me. It was a synthesis of the two dogs important to my son and I and the thought of a mixed breed never crossed our minds. It was the third puppy the mom brought directly to my house. And I had not learned that the father of the puppies was a German Shepherd until the second puppy was brought home. I mean it seems like a total set up. In an unbelieveable kind of way. It is so unlikely that I couldn't even make this up. So you can believe whatever you want, but my wife and I believed and will always believe that Emma was a gift from heaven and from my son.
Now wasn't I supposed to be talking about hunting? Oh yes, there I was bringing sweet Emma wild boar hunting with me one day when she was about two years old. But I guess before we get too far in to that I should mention that I had trained her how to follow human scent, to track whatever scent I put in her face. If you came to my house and asked me about it I would tell you to give me your hat or your jacket or a handkerchief or whatever. Then I would say you had five minutes to go wherever on the 48 acre property you wanted to go. I would hold Emma in a certain way in a certain place so she knew the score. When the time was up, I'd put the scent in her face and tell to 'go get him' and cut her loose. She would put her nose to the ground and run right to you. Every time. I watched her track a person's footprints over the blacktop he had run across. That is where I really understood that a dog's nose really was golden. She was trained to track what I told her to and I brought her hunting, I suppose, in case I wounded a hog. Perhaps I could put the smell of blood in her nose and she could go find it. That's what I was thinking. And since we were constant companions by then anyway, at the very least it would be nice to have her hiking with me and running up and down hills together.
So we had done a bit of hunting that day. She was having fun and was very interested in (obsessed with) the ground squirrel population. We were driving back on the private dirt roads toward valleys closer to the entrance with a few hours of sunlight left. I'm stopping and glassing all the time. At one point I look ahead and see black things. Hogs. A mess of them. I park the truck, grab my pack, range finder and rifle and get off the road to distance them. 600 yards. Well, that is a long ways BUT the road I am driving on is angling sharply right toward the direction the hogs are drifting toward. So I start walking down the road. "Come one, Emma!" I say and she feels the energy and we move quickly and quietly down the dirt road.
After a bit I stop and ranged them again. 500 yards. I can do better because this road is perfectly engineered direction-wise to cut them off. We walked some more. Wind was from the pigs to me so it was not an issue. I just didn't want to scuff the ground and make a noise. Next stop 420 yards. Nope. Next stop 360 yards. I can get closer. Next stop 300 yards on the button. That I can work with, I thought.
I dropped my backpack on the sidehill off the road and laid down on the grass. I told Emma to Sit and that I was going to be shooting in a few seconds (she understood the 'Sit' part.) The hogs were still eating and moving. Not casually, not gradually, but at a get a mouthful or two and move along pace. Their movement was from left to right and they were positioned directly in front of me. I knew I had more than one shot if I missed because they had a ways to go to their safety on the right. I picked the biggest hog. Then I waited until it moved it's body from it's east to west path to a position where it was facing north, uphill, and getting a mouthful. I am slightly above it in elevation. Knowing that my .270 had a max 8 or 9 inch drop at 300 yards, and was sighted in at 3 inches high at 100 yards, I knew for sure if I aimed at the base of the skull/top of the neck (from how it was positioned relative to me) that I couldn't miss because to miss would only hit it somewhere further down the spine. This was a dead hog, I knew it. "Ready Emma?" I said, "here we go..." And then BOOM! I saw the hog lurch but it took a step to its left. BOOM once again. It moved down hill a step. BOOM! It fell and stopped moving. But I wasn't taking any chances. BOOM! Once more. And then just because BOOM one final time.
All went quiet. The bevy of companions the hog had travelled with were all disappeared into wherever they go when you shoot. They were all gone. Except the black one that lay there still on the side of that hill 300 yards away. It was over. The hog was dead. I was pretty happy and turned to celebrate with Emma. I looked and she was not there. What? Emma? I quickly looked up the side hill on the right side of the road, nothing. I looked down hill on the left side of the road, nothing. She was nowhere. Where did my Emma go?
I didn't know what to think but no matter what, either to go get the hog or go look for Emma I knew I had to go back and get my truck. It was a good 1/4 mile or more back up the road so I gathered my brass and started back toward the truck quite perplexed. The dirt road was a winding mountain road and the road was always disappearing around the next corner so you couldn't ever really see very far down the road. I kept looking up hill and down hill and calling Emma's name. Nothing. A little bit later I came around that last turn before where my truck was parked and hoped to see Emma nearby. Nope, could not see her. I really didn't know what I was going to do. When I rounded the front bumper on the driver's side of the truck I got almost to the door when saw a head sheepishly and meekly peek around the back bumper. It was Emma! She had been scared to death from the rifle shots! I understood right when I saw her. Though I had taken her shooting before, it was only with .22's and not the big-boy rifles.
When I started shooting at that hog, which was a nice one by the way, she had bolted as fast as she could and as far away as she could. She wanted nothing to do with all that noise and had ran back to the last place she had felt safe - the truck.
Yep, Emma was a lover and a healer, a burden bearer, a soul reader, a soul companion, a life-giver and a personal gift to our family (she even taught my wife that she needed to stop swearing.) But she was not a hunting dog. She taught that lesson very clearly that day.
But as mentioned before, I'm a slow learner...(Part II coming soon.)
Twice Upon a Time fate pushed away the clouds which usually obscure the enlightened path to California wild boar hunting and I was granted access to private, absolutely happening hog land. I did not shy away from the opportunities.
As these things go, they do not last forever. After a few years someone dies, the step kids get control of the property and the rug is swept out from under you. Or someone sells some parcels key to the hunting access, the new owners do not agree to hunting (they prioritize growing marijuana in a fiberglass greenhouse, pre-marijuana legalization law days, above your desire to hunt) and you begin to understand from conversations with new owners, one after another, that the deal is no longer the deal.
BUT while I had access I took full advantage. The second opportunity mentioned above was massive. I had full access to an area about 2.5 - 3 miles x about 2 miles or so. Well over 3000 acres. Probably closer to 4000 acres. The first year I spent figuring the place out. This meant hucking the hills, looking for tracks, signs, figuring out which water holes they were using (all of them was the answer), driving around, glassing and trying different spots at first light or last light or both. I finally got the puzzle reduced to a few likely hotspots. It was then that I decided to bring my dog, Emma, who was a golden retriever-German Shepherd mix.
The only problem with this idea was that Emma was not a hunting dog. Not at all; she was a lover, a healer. If you have read my other stories you will know that there was a reason for tears around our house. Like all dogs, Emma was sent directly from heaven and her job was to unselfishly help carry the burden of those tears. She could read your soul and knew exactly when to come close and put her head on your knee or snuggle in. She was a constant companion.
In fact the way we even got her was, well a little miraculous and you may not believe me. You see, when my boy was still here he and I had often discussed getting a dog. We went back and forth about what kind. He wanted to get a golden retriever and I wanted a German Shepherd (GSD). We kept dreaming about it and haggling and going over pros and cons. We never made a decision.
About 6 months after my boy's address changed to one not of this realm, my wife, who is my boy's step-mom, knew that something had to change and she started looking for a dog for me. She was looking for a German Shepherd. Of course I was not aware of this. Then one day I looked up and walking across the strawberry field in front of the house was a big beautiful golden retriever. She got to the edge of the field and walked right up to me. She was very friendly. I had never seen her before but knew she must live nearby. It was very dangerous for her if she got down by the road and she would get killed for sure if she wandered the additional 75 yards down the driveway and got there.
So I put her in my kitchen, took her picture, closed the doors and went knocking on doors to see who was missing a golden retriever. Our place was at 6 o'clock in this valley and the first house I went to was at 7 o'clock. I knocked on the door, showed a picture of the dog and moved on if it was not the right place. Of course the actual house where the dog lived was at 3 o'clock, the opposite direction of where I had started. And when I showed the guy there the dog's picture, he hung his head and said, yeah, it was his. And she was an escape artist. I gladly went home, retrieved Maxine the beautiful big golden retriever, and drove her back home. She lived across three fields from me up on a side hill across the valley.
A week later I see Maxine coming across the strawberry field again, only this time she has a companion, a small puppy. They walked right into my yard and came right up to me. I said hello to Maxine and her fat little brown puppy, loaded them up in my truck and took them home. The owner's shame deepened and he apologized more than he needed to. He also explained that Maxine had a litter of puppies and did I want one. I said no thank you and bid farewell.
A few days later I look up and here is Maxine coming across the field again with a puppy. Only this one was all black and not as fat. They came right up to me and I said hello as before and then loaded them up and took them home. The owner explained how Maxine had got out so many times that he owed the County a bunch of money and would I please take a puppy. I was not interested but I did learn that the dad of those pups lived a few houses down the hill and was a very expensive German Shepherd imported from out of state who himself had escaped once and had gone philandering; hence the puppies.
A few days later I look up and here comes Maxine across the strawberry field again. I could see that she also had a puppy with her. I went out to greet these visitors and as they were jogging up to me I looked at the puppy and it looked exactly like a German Shepherd. It's coloring was brown and black where a GSD's is. Its ears were floppy, not erect, but her colorings were 100% GSD. As it got closer I realized that I was looking at a perfect mix of a German Shepherd and a golden retriever running right at me. I squatted down and this dog ran right up into my lap, reached up and licked my face.
Well hello, I said. I sat there kind of dumbfounded as this cute little puppy loved on me like it knew me all its life. Maxine had brought me one puppy, then another and then a third. But only on seeing the marking of the third did I put together that these puppies were the exact compromise/synthesis between the two breeds my boy and I had talked about getting.
I took the dogs back to the owner only this time took him up on his offer to take a puppy. We took the little GSD-marked golden retriever with floppy ears back home and named her Emma after a girl my boy had a secret crush on at one point.
Emma was the best. She fit right in immediately. We went on daily walks multiple times a day. She saw me cry and stood between my legs, just being close or crawled in my lap and licked tears. A few months later I got this strange email. Hello, do you remember me? It was Jane, a friend I had known in high school. She was two years younger and had primarily dated a guy in my class for most of high school. I didn't know anything about her post high school trajectory and had not seen her since the summer after my senior year. She said she was living in a midwestern state, married to a doctor but had to tell me something. I have no idea how she even got my email address. But she had hunted me down because of the urgency. She said I would probably think she was a kook but she didn't care. She had heard I lost my son. And that a few days before speaking to me she had had a dream. She said she dreamed she saw my son standing in a field eating a strawberry and that he had a dog with him. She did not know what my son looked like but symbolically she knew it to be him. That was it. I could think she was crazy if I wanted to but she felt compelled to tell me. She said she didn't know what it meant and that I could do with it whatever I wanted to. Have a nice life, I did my part, good bye.
Well I was stunned. I told my wife and we both wondered what kind of stuff was this? I mean, I am a slow learner but even I was starting to read the signs...strawberry, field, a dog, my boy. When I had seen Emma running toward me on that first day and realized a GSD-golden retriever mix was coming right at me I thought it was a mighty convenient coincidence. But when Jane told me about the powerful dream she had to urgently tell me or not be able to live with herself, I just knew that this dog was a very special, personal gift being given to me specifically and directly.
How could I help but to not believe that my boy was somehow involved in the giving end? Wouldn't you believe that? It was custom picked just for me. It was a synthesis of the two dogs important to my son and I and the thought of a mixed breed never crossed our minds. It was the third puppy the mom brought directly to my house. And I had not learned that the father of the puppies was a German Shepherd until the second puppy was brought home. I mean it seems like a total set up. In an unbelieveable kind of way. It is so unlikely that I couldn't even make this up. So you can believe whatever you want, but my wife and I believed and will always believe that Emma was a gift from heaven and from my son.
Now wasn't I supposed to be talking about hunting? Oh yes, there I was bringing sweet Emma wild boar hunting with me one day when she was about two years old. But I guess before we get too far in to that I should mention that I had trained her how to follow human scent, to track whatever scent I put in her face. If you came to my house and asked me about it I would tell you to give me your hat or your jacket or a handkerchief or whatever. Then I would say you had five minutes to go wherever on the 48 acre property you wanted to go. I would hold Emma in a certain way in a certain place so she knew the score. When the time was up, I'd put the scent in her face and tell to 'go get him' and cut her loose. She would put her nose to the ground and run right to you. Every time. I watched her track a person's footprints over the blacktop he had run across. That is where I really understood that a dog's nose really was golden. She was trained to track what I told her to and I brought her hunting, I suppose, in case I wounded a hog. Perhaps I could put the smell of blood in her nose and she could go find it. That's what I was thinking. And since we were constant companions by then anyway, at the very least it would be nice to have her hiking with me and running up and down hills together.
So we had done a bit of hunting that day. She was having fun and was very interested in (obsessed with) the ground squirrel population. We were driving back on the private dirt roads toward valleys closer to the entrance with a few hours of sunlight left. I'm stopping and glassing all the time. At one point I look ahead and see black things. Hogs. A mess of them. I park the truck, grab my pack, range finder and rifle and get off the road to distance them. 600 yards. Well, that is a long ways BUT the road I am driving on is angling sharply right toward the direction the hogs are drifting toward. So I start walking down the road. "Come one, Emma!" I say and she feels the energy and we move quickly and quietly down the dirt road.
After a bit I stop and ranged them again. 500 yards. I can do better because this road is perfectly engineered direction-wise to cut them off. We walked some more. Wind was from the pigs to me so it was not an issue. I just didn't want to scuff the ground and make a noise. Next stop 420 yards. Nope. Next stop 360 yards. I can get closer. Next stop 300 yards on the button. That I can work with, I thought.
I dropped my backpack on the sidehill off the road and laid down on the grass. I told Emma to Sit and that I was going to be shooting in a few seconds (she understood the 'Sit' part.) The hogs were still eating and moving. Not casually, not gradually, but at a get a mouthful or two and move along pace. Their movement was from left to right and they were positioned directly in front of me. I knew I had more than one shot if I missed because they had a ways to go to their safety on the right. I picked the biggest hog. Then I waited until it moved it's body from it's east to west path to a position where it was facing north, uphill, and getting a mouthful. I am slightly above it in elevation. Knowing that my .270 had a max 8 or 9 inch drop at 300 yards, and was sighted in at 3 inches high at 100 yards, I knew for sure if I aimed at the base of the skull/top of the neck (from how it was positioned relative to me) that I couldn't miss because to miss would only hit it somewhere further down the spine. This was a dead hog, I knew it. "Ready Emma?" I said, "here we go..." And then BOOM! I saw the hog lurch but it took a step to its left. BOOM once again. It moved down hill a step. BOOM! It fell and stopped moving. But I wasn't taking any chances. BOOM! Once more. And then just because BOOM one final time.
All went quiet. The bevy of companions the hog had travelled with were all disappeared into wherever they go when you shoot. They were all gone. Except the black one that lay there still on the side of that hill 300 yards away. It was over. The hog was dead. I was pretty happy and turned to celebrate with Emma. I looked and she was not there. What? Emma? I quickly looked up the side hill on the right side of the road, nothing. I looked down hill on the left side of the road, nothing. She was nowhere. Where did my Emma go?
I didn't know what to think but no matter what, either to go get the hog or go look for Emma I knew I had to go back and get my truck. It was a good 1/4 mile or more back up the road so I gathered my brass and started back toward the truck quite perplexed. The dirt road was a winding mountain road and the road was always disappearing around the next corner so you couldn't ever really see very far down the road. I kept looking up hill and down hill and calling Emma's name. Nothing. A little bit later I came around that last turn before where my truck was parked and hoped to see Emma nearby. Nope, could not see her. I really didn't know what I was going to do. When I rounded the front bumper on the driver's side of the truck I got almost to the door when saw a head sheepishly and meekly peek around the back bumper. It was Emma! She had been scared to death from the rifle shots! I understood right when I saw her. Though I had taken her shooting before, it was only with .22's and not the big-boy rifles.
When I started shooting at that hog, which was a nice one by the way, she had bolted as fast as she could and as far away as she could. She wanted nothing to do with all that noise and had ran back to the last place she had felt safe - the truck.
Yep, Emma was a lover and a healer, a burden bearer, a soul reader, a soul companion, a life-giver and a personal gift to our family (she even taught my wife that she needed to stop swearing.) But she was not a hunting dog. She taught that lesson very clearly that day.
But as mentioned before, I'm a slow learner...(Part II coming soon.)
