the scope scarcely changed, and I could see the pig lying on the ground, kick- ing a little. Two hours later the scale in Bill’s game-processing room read 136 pounds, just the right size for barbeque. The next day I sat morning and
One older Texas hunter firmly believes that red pigs taste best. This young barbeque pig tasted great, so he may be right!
the oak’s trunk. From what I could see it looked to be medium-sized, and my primary mission was barbeque. Eventually the pig took a step for-
ward, the triangular black head poking from behind the tree trunk, along with a bit of shoulder. I put the black dot in the middle of the neck and pulled the trigger. The rifl e was equipped with a suppressor that eliminated muzzle fl ash, plus any slight recoil from the 6.8 SPC cartridge. The view through
evening in stands, and spent midday still-hunting some oak woods with Bill. No pigs came to the stands, but we did ease within 50 yards of a bunch in the oaks, a big sow with a litter of 20-pound piglets. Many Texas ranchers would have urged me to shoot as many as possible, but Bill really loves to hunt pigs, and decided to let them grow a little more before converting them into pork. (Nearly 200 pigs were taken off his ranch in 2009.) After picking me up from my
evening stand, Bill asked if I’d like to try a different kind of night hunting. I said sure, so we drove to a neighbor- ing ranch where Bill had leased the pig-shooting rights. Bill owns a genera- tion-3 night-vision binocular, and one of his ARs is equipped with a gen-3 Night Optics scope. We left the vehicle and hiked a
little way into a cattle pasture along a river. There was just enough starlight to be able to walk slowly, so it was somewhat eerie to look through the binocular and be able to see animals half a mile away — and to be able to tell the difference between deer, cows and feral pigs. We located one big bunch of pigs
For eating, younger boars and any sow are preferred. This big sow weighed close to 200 pounds and will make quite a bit of barbeque. Many people prefer wild pork to domestic, because the diverse diet of feral pigs gives the meat more fl avor.
Page 34 July — September 2011
scattered along a shallow, dry draw, but the mild breeze was wrong for a stalk, so we hiked back to the vehicle and drove a mile in a big half-circle. After getting out again we followed a fenceline that would take us past the pigs. After 20 minutes of moving slowly and quietly, we eased within 75 yards of the nearest pigs. Bill set up his shooting sticks and I rested my fore-end hand in the crotch, while Bill used the night- vision binocular to pick out the biggest boar. This turned out to be white with big black spots, the sort of pig that most hunters don’t want as a trophy, since it doesn’t look “Russian.” But I’d al- ready taken a big quasi-Russian boar in California back in the 1980s, so pressed my face into the folding eyecup of the scope, switching on the night-vision. The boar was feeding next to a
smaller, darker sow, and I could see both very clearly in the greenish-tinted
view of the scope. It seemed quite strange to be standing in the open within 75 yards of a pair of totally un- concerned wild pigs. If you want to reduce a wild pig
to immediate possession, dropping them right there is a good idea, since they don’t leave much of a blood trail, because of the fat under the tough hide. The easiest drop-shot is right in the middle of the shoulder, two-thirds of the way up the body, where a tough bullet will break both shoulder blades and the spine. This shot also provides some room for error, but it’s important not to hit very far behind the shoulder, as a pig’s lungs don’t extend as far be- hind the shoulder as a deer’s. The other two drop-shots are the
head and the neck. The brain lies just under the front edge of the ears and, de- spite a pig’s high intelligence, is pretty small. The neck shot is much easier. The neck is very short, and just in front of the shoulders both the spine and major blood vessels are located right in the middle. Even if the bullet misses the spine slightly, the pig normally will be paralyzed long enough to bleed out. However, this big black-and-
white hog was facing almost directly away, feeding toward a brushy draw. I put the reticle on his shoulder, hoping he’d turn enough to put a bullet in the shoulder or the neck, but he just kept ambling slowly in the same direction. Eventually the reticle drifted to
just behind his ear, seemingly on its own, and I squeezed the trigger. The boar collapsed and never moved. His companion immediately ran for the draw, along with every other pig in the herd, reacting to the hollow “clunk” of the suppressed barrel. After taking some photos, we
walked back along the fence toward the vehicle, soon passing a barely vis- ible corral about 150 yards on the other side of the fence. Bill kept sweeping the landscape with the night-vision binocu- lar, and suddenly stopped, whispering, “There’s a coyote next to the corral.” I started to drop to a knee, intending to rest the rifl e over a fence wire, but Bill quickly pushed the sticks in front of me. The coyote was trotting slowly in front of the corral, but stopped momentarily just as it passed the last fencepost. The reticle found the shoulder and the shot went off just as the coyote started to
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