For images of us standing around and dressing the hog,
just click on the thumbnails below to see the full sized images!
Chuck and The Hog
Chuck and The Hog
Omar and The Hog
Chuck, Omar and The Hog
Chuck Sr, Chuck Jr and Omar
Chuck Sr, Chuck Jr and Omar
Chuck Sr, Chuck Jr and Omar
The Hog
The Hog
Chuck and The Hog
Work
Work
Work
Work
Work
Work
Work
The Hog
Lucky and Chuck
Omar Cleaning...
Almost done!
Hog Hunt Runs According To the Script
By Chuck Manetta
Jr.
It was a cool and damp morning in the swamp of The
Everglades National Preserve when Omar and I set off to our
pre-designated trees with our climbing treestands. Due to an
unfortunate late wake-up, our trek had to be made with great
stealth. The sun was now rising fully in the eastern sky. We reached
Omar's setup at around 7. He chose this pine tree because it
strategically faced the wall of a large hardwood oak stand. By the
time I reached my pine tree, it was roughly 8.
Trying to stay
quiet, I climbed slowly. The higher I got, the more fresh tracks
became obvious criss-crossing the landscape below me. Although we
scouted this area the day before, these tracks appeared to have been
made overnight and were very encouraging.
While going up with
my two-piece climber, I would quietly lift and securely set each
piece against the tree, then wait and listen for any sound of animal
movement. The only thing that I could hear clearly at this point
were the roaring engines of airboats three to four miles away as
other hunters set out for their morning hunts. With the subtle
morning breezes and the stillness of the Everglades, they sounded as
if they were right over the next wall of trees. When I climbed as
far as I could before running into branches (around 30 feet), I was
able to get a good look at my options and shooting lanes.
The
pine tree that I had chosen offered a great view of the same oak
stand Omar was watching, but farther west. Separating the oak and my
pine tree was a narrow strip of waist-high grass that flowed off to
the west then turned southwest to my left. Behind me to the south
and east -- the area I had walked through to get to my stand -- was
full of palmetto scrubs and pine trees. I took in the view and
decided I was in a great spot.
It was 8:58 in the morning and
starting to get warm. While slowly taking off my jacket liner to get
more comfortable, I started to hear the sounds that I had been
waiting for. You know, those few plopitty-plop sounds of something
walking in the mud. I put my jacket aside and brought up my
Winchester .338 Magnum. I put the scope on a 3-foot clearing in the
grass where the sounds were coming from.
Sure enough, at
exactly 9 on my watch, the broadside of a razorback wild boar filled
my scope. I had the crosshairs on his kill zone when a thought
crossed my mind: "Is he the legal 15 inches tall?" At 100 yards, it
was hard to be sure. For a split second, I concentrated with my left
eye to get a better perspective of the distance and his
size.
Not wasting another second, I decided: BAM! "One Shot,
One Kill!" (Our family motto.) The hog went straight down to the
ground. The 250-Grain Nosler Partition went smashing into his left
shoulder, snapping his leg in half, continued through the kill zone
and exited the opposite side of his body. After locking and loading
the next round (just in case), I watched through the scope until I
was sure he was down for good. I wasn't about to let this guy get up
and run into the swamp!
"Omar," I whispered into my Motorola
Talk-About lapel microphone.
"Did you get something?" he
asked.
I said, "Yep, a hog! So get over here. Our work has
just begun!"
Sure enough, this became an all-day task. After
getting down and reaching the hog, another question ran through my
head. Did I really want this thing to be so big? WHOA! This was a
180-pound monster! It certainly didn't look that big at 100 yards.
Regardless, now we had the task of dragging him out.
We were
more than a third of a mile away from the car and the road, so we
spent a few minutes putting together a drag cord. We tied one end of
the rope around the hogs legs and the other end around a section of
tree branch about a foot long. I grabbed one side of the branch and
Omar grabbed the other. Side by side we proceeded to drag this beast
through thick brush, over rocks and sometimes through the mud. It
took us two hours to get to the car, but the struggle wasn't over
yet.
We had been using my father's Lincoln Continental to go
back and forth from our Coleman pop-pp camper and our hunting
expeditions. The main problem was that the only place to put this
monster was in a roof-mounted Yackima rack used for hauling extra
gear and game. The rack had worked great for Florida deer, which are
usually around 100 pounds, but I had no idea how we were going to
get this monster up on the roof. It took some brute strength, along
with a little bit of tusk dragging across the paint job, but we did
it.
Just when I thought my work was done, I realized we had
yet to skin and process this huge pig. Well, we eventually decided
that could wait until after a few stories and a well-earned
beer.