Rootin’ With The Hawgs

The brand-new day broke through the dark. Through the window near my bunkbed, I could see that it was windy out, and chilly, with a hint of rain at the edges. It was the kind of day that makes for ruddy cheeks and green grass. My trouble is that I believe ruddy cheeks are for girls, and green grass is for cows -- and I’m happiest when I’m good and stinking hot.

“Ah, lookit the blustery weather,” Charlie offered from the bunk across the way, “makes you feel good to be alive.”

“When it’s like this, I don’t feel either.” I was starting off cranky. We were in the bunkhouse on Brahma Island, which is the largest fresh-water-surrounded island in the United States. We were going wild boar hunting this morning, and I was a little bit in the hole with the thought of mucking about in a cold, evil swamp when I really wanted to muck about in a hot, yummy swamp. Oh, well, here we were, out in the edges of Yeehaw Junction... it had to be more comfortable than being up to my gizzard in that blue snow which caused me such icy wretchedness on Mt. Everest in Colorado. Hawg huntin’ is more temperate than elk huntin’, if for no other reason than that the clever beasties are considerate enough not to climb mountains and live in sub-zero misery.

Charlie and Your Humble Obedient &tc. had arrived the day before. The previous day’s exploits could be summed up as a learning experience. We learned that the huge guide, who went by the name “Snake” was crazy. And that while it was a relatively simple matter to shoot a hawg, getting a trophy boar was a different matter entirely.

We had spotted a dozen or more of our quarry, but none of the size and ferociousness we lusted for.

Little did I realize that today was to be The Day.

Delicious smells were coming from the huge bunkhouse kitchen, where Doug The Cook was preparing great masses of concentrated cholesterol. Since it is a well-known, proven scientific fact that vacation calories and fats do not ever stick to the human body, I found myself eagerly wolfing down humongous clots of sausage, eggs, grits and white gravy (poured all over the hot muffins). A mere half-gallon of coffee, and I was ready to whip my weight in butterflies.

“Want some more coffee, Walt?” Charlie had the big pot in his clutches, waving it at me.

I declined politely; I had enough caffeine in me to make my hands shake like Marcel Marceau on crack.

“Well then,” rumbled Snake’s freight-train voice, “let’s go git us a big hawg.”

The truck awaited us outside. It was a sort of pickup truck on steroids. It had a big cage in it to hold the dogs, and a bunch of gunracks on the cab roof. The tires were about chest-high, and the bumpers would not have been out of place on an Abrams M-1 Main Battle Tank.

We climbed on.

Well, as an average, we climbed on. Charlie leaped on, and I sort of creaked on. I find it annoying that Charlie is two years older than I am, and he jogs. He’s as fit as a flea. Now, me... I’m 60. That’s not old, if you’re a tree. But I’ve had somewhat rougher mileage -- my bod looks like it was put together on a government contract out of scrap parts. But I’m not old. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am. I don’t want to pick on Charlie just because he’s so healthy. Well, not much, anyway. I always say that if you can’t say something good about someone, sit right down here by me.

The two dogs were yelping for joy at the prospect of going hunting. They raced each other to get into the cage in the truck.

A great lurch, and we were off.

It is now time to step aside, so to speak, and explain the concept of wild boar hunting on Brahma Island.

The first thing you should know is that wild boars have no natural enemies. That means that they are not necessarily afraid of you. Keep that in mind.

There are two options: You can ride around, looking far ahead through the brush and trees to spot the critturs. Or, when the vegetation gets really heavy, you can stop the truck, and let the dog run around sniffing through the palmettos. Either scenario generally has the same result -- the dog winds up chasing the boar (which can run amazingly fast) until the boar gets really annoyed, and turns at bay. This is a critical time, for the dog is really stupid. Or brave to the point of recklessness.

The dog will continue to bark, and charge at the boar, distracting it from the approach of the truck. The hunter piles off of the truck, and gets over near enough to the boar for a clear shot before it finally decides to make muttburgers out of its pestering canine tormentor. This is tricky, because the boar may just decide to suddenly ignore the dog and make peopleburgers out of the guy with the rifle.

We had decided by rock-paper-scissors that it was my “up” this day. That meant that Charlie would be my backup, whose job it would be to drop the boar if it began to eat me if I missed my shot.

We rode around uneventfully for a while, and then Snake decided to let the dog check out an isolated patch of palmetto. We all got out of the truck to watch Ole Blue go to work.

Bingo!

A basso profundo grunt came from the palmetto clump just as Ole Blue poked his nose in. With frenetically insane barks, O.B. flushed the monster from its hidey-hole.

Unfortunately, the inconsiderate beast ran directly out of the far side of the clump, and headed at high speed for the deepest jungle on the island with the maniac dog at his heels. Snake, Charlie, and Your Humble Obedient followed around the palmetto clump.

Normally, the only part of me that runs is my nose (or my stockings, when I’m in drag), but this was an emergency. As Snake shouted over his shoulder, “If he gets into that jungle, he may kill the dog before we can get anywhere near him!”

The jungle that Snake was referring to looked like something out of the original King Kong movie. We watched the mismatched pair disappear into it. Snake was nearly out of sight by the time I wheezed up to the edge of the incredibly dense palmetto. It was so thick, I could not see my own feet, and I could just make out parts of Snake, who was standing about ten feet ahead of me.

The dog kept up its frenzied barking.

I could hear a sudden, loud crash-rustle of palmetto fronds, and suddenly the dog gave a high-pitched squeal and went silent.

Snake cussed. We pushed into the palmettos as fast as we could. I couldn’t see a thing, and was now just following the sound made by the big guy ahead of me. I began to think about those huge rattlesnakes that were in all the photos around the bunkhouse. They lived in this very stuff. Eek. Eek.

The dog started barking again. Relief.

Snake was suddenly there. He grabbed my shoulder and whispered fiercely:

“He’s right up ahead, if you duck down low, you can see him. Go in an git him! Quick! Before he kills Ole Blue!”

There was nothing for it. I believe in the philosophy that no man can be sure of his courage until the day of his death, but I was too much caught up in the hunt to be rational and seriously consider the insanity of just what I was about to do. Besides, the secret to the greatest enjoyment of life is to live dangerously.

The Fabled PC puts it differently. She says that when I am between two evils, I like to try out the one I’ve never done before. And I am not afraid of dying – I just do not want to be there when it happens.

So I offered up a prayer that all rattlesnakes would take a short vacation, and got down on my stomach to begin crawling toward the racket. Charlie helped my state of mind enormously by offering the whispered observation:

“Geez, Walt, I can’t see any part of you at all past your waist.” His foot was touching mine as he spoke. “I can’t give you any backup.”

Oh. Fine.

The din was deafening. When the boar gruntsquealed, the palmettos shook. The crazy dog was barking itself into psychosis. I was shaking like an aspen leaf, and without even aspen their leaf to do it.

Then I saw it.

Well, I saw the ear. The ear was huge. It was about 7 or 8 feet away. Lessee now... the dog’s mayhem was coming from a little to my right... that means the boar was facing it. If I could see an ear, that meant the rest of the boar was... over there.

I brought the rifle up. It rattled a palmetto frond.

And everything changed.

The boar turned on me at full speed. The time it took to travel about 1½ body lengths was about a fifth of a second. My finger squeezed the trigger convulsively.

The boar contacted the end of the rifle barrel just as the rifle went off. I felt a short, bright pain by the bridge of my nose and eye. It was the boar’s razor tusk.

Then Snake was there, and the nutty dog was ripping at the dead boar’s ear in a righteous indignation.

I was bleeding like (you should pardon the expression) a stuck pig. Charlie handed me his handkerchief. He looked at the tableau.

“Wow! That’s as close as you can get! Great shot!”

Little did he know that I never shot intentionally, all I did was sort of spasm at the right split-second. Snake handed me a bottle of ardent spirits from the truck.

I took a shaky much-needed pull, then another. All I could think of to say was, “The reason why I like to drink: when I’m thirsty, to cure it; when I’m not... to prevent it.”

I think next time Charlie and I go out, we’re going to try rhinoceros wrestling -- or maybe bobbing for cobras... you know, something a little tamer.

===================================================