Yesterday was not a hunting day. This week was the kick off of my son’s football season. Yesterday was an away game, so I was out with my Son’s team at the first game of the season. Yes, My favorite football player calls me Mom! Anyway today I really wanted to get out and see what there was to see in the woods.
We took the dog out with us, he really wants to get a chance to do some tracking. His people are annoying him by dropping the animals right where they shoot and he doesn’t get to have any fun. We got to the woods around 5.. I took a walk with the dog and hubby drove up to the drop off point for my stand. He then got my gear out and waited for me and Gambit to get to him. I had a fairly quiet evening, there was a small buck that came in. He was clearly well fed, I intially thought he was a pregnant doe, but he had some knobby nubbs on his head (still in velvet). He would have been open but something scared him before I had realized that he was a he and not a pregnant she. Oh well, Hunting is not getting. A few minutes later well up my shooting lane another animal crossed, but I could only see the bottom half. It had very skinny spindly legs and was probably a year old, but since I could not see the rest of it to determine what it was I let it go too.
Sunset was around 8:30 pm, so we usually sit until 45 minutes to an hour past sunset. we are allowed to hunt until 1.5 hours after sunset. But if you can’t see it, you can’t shoot it. And thermal or night vision adapters are only permissible for wild boar. So about 9:00 I was thinking about starting to pack up my toys to go home when I heard BANG! Man, He did it again. Hubby got something. So it was decided, I packed up my stuff and headed over to his stand.
Just as he was getting ready to pack up himself he heard a noise off to the right side of his stand and what did he see… 2 year old wild boar. This was the first time getting a larger animal out of this area. My oh my, that was fun. The path to the stand is fairly steep with the stand near the bottom of a valley. There’s a large ditch and the other side is fairly steep up the other way. Water often runs down the gulley, but at this time of year it was pretty dry. Rather than drag a pig up the hill we decided to go down. We loaded the pig onto the sled again and planned dragged it down the gully. I let hubby go back and drive the car around to the bottom of the gulley and started to make my way down… Mr Pig and I were on a fairly flat edge next to the drop-off (the base of the gulley was about 10 -15 feet down below) I wanted to go down a small less steep section. What could go wrong? Just as I got going I hit a larger branch and the pig rolled out of the sled and down to the base of the gulley… Ok.. well guess we are going down here. (At this point hubby was already heading to the car and was halfway up the hill. I went down loaded the piggy again into the sled and started down hill thinking this was gonna be easy. Ha Ha. Got Mr. Piggy all loaded up into the sled again and off I went with my pig. the thing about a sled is, It’s sloped to make it easy to go over stuff, but that also means If I hit a steeper area and had to stop for a moment Mr. Pig wanted to keep going right out the front of my sled. It took a little bit of doing and a knot in the pull rope of the sled till I found the right angle to pull where he stayed put and I was able to pull him fairly easily. Whoo boy. by the time hubby got pulled around and came to meet me and take over the pulling I was soaked thru..
We got him loaded up and headed to our field dressing location. We finished the processing and put him in the fridge. 77 pounds of wild boar in the fridge. We got home just after Midnight, put our gear away and I fell into bed. all in all it was a good night hunting.
