New Years Day Boar
As my alarm clock began to buzz I opened my eyes. I was already wake, just lying
in bed reflecting on the past times I had tried to kill this elusive animal and wondering if today would end in failure.
He was big, smart and obviously the dominant boar in the area. His tracks were as large as the palm of my hand and judging from the marks on the telephone post supported
a nice set of tusks.
My quest began two months earlier when this large boar started feeding at the two
feeders on a piece of property about ten miles outside of town. One feeder is
a regular two-door hog feeder, which holds 200 pounds of corn, and the other is a five-foot section of 4” PVC pipe.
The PVC feeder has six holes the size of quarters drilled in the sides for dispensing corn, plugged on one end with an attachment
for wiring and a clean out on the other used for filling. Both feeders work equally
well, the hog feeder is good because it lets large groups of hogs feed for days without running out of corn. The PVC feeder makes the hogs work a little harder for their food but they don’t seem to mind rolling
it around.
At first I didn’t really notice the lack of hog activity around the feeders
because hogs are prone to move in and out of the area, but after two weeks it struck me that the only sign at both feeders
were of the same large boar. All other hog sign in the area was gone! I’d not heard of a boar taking over a feeder before and wasn’t sure if this is what had happened
but it sure seemed suspicious.
I began hunting the boar by sitting at strategic locations around both feeders
both morning and evening on the weekends. I was unable to hunt after work because
it would be dark by the time I arrived at my hunting area and Oklahoma doesn’t allow hunting hogs at night. This tactic didn’t work so I recruited some help, my stepson and cousin would
sit at one feeder and I would sit at the other feeder. Still no success, and
to make matters worse the hog kept feeding at both feeders and then began rooting in the pasture where I parked my pickup!
After being totally frustrated about what to do I came up with a new idea. I was so consumed with killing the boar I never even thought of taking one of his
three food sources away. The PVC feeder seemed to be the one he came to first
and had the thickest brush around it for a bedding area, so I emptied the two-door feeder and let the boar develop a pattern
to this feeder. Still no luck! I
sat as far away from the feeder as possible, used tree stands, watched the wind direction very carefully, used cover scents,
nothing seemed to help. The boar would come in every night and eat about twenty
pounds of corn, rub on a telephone pole and then mark it with his tusks. It was
obvious he was only moving at night and wasn’t about to make a mistake and come to the feeder in the daylight.
I was sitting in my stand Saturday December 30th wondering if I should
just give up on this hog or try another technique. The baiting was keeping him
in the area but I wasn’t about the kill this hog sitting in a stand over a feeder.
I thought about trying to call him using a hog grunt call but this hasn’t been a very dependable method for me
in the past. I thought about tracking him but the ground was frozen too hard to follow his tracks for very far and would probably
end up spooking him out of the area anyway. I had just formulated a plan to sneak
around to all the likely bedding thickets in the area and use my grunt call to hopefully bring him out in the open when it
began to snow! Oh boy! Snow! My previously formulated plan immediately went out the window and I knew what I would
do, track him in the snow!
Now, tracking something in the snow in Oklahoma
is a very rare event. Under normal circumstances I would have had the same luck
sitting in my stand and that’s exactly what I thought when I woke the next morning.
My heart sank when I saw that all we received was a very light dusting of snow, not even enough to use for tracking. Still, being as dedicated as I am, I went out to check my feeder. Sure enough, there were his familiar tracks in the snow next to the feeder.
Fighting back the urge to follow them I went home with the idea of just giving up on the boar. Two months of hunting the same boar without ever seeing or hearing him was getting frustrating, plus I
was tired of feeding him. When I got home I had made up my mind it was over. I would try to use my grunt call on the edge of the thickets the next day and if that
didn’t work I would quit filling the feeder and hope he left to torment some other hunter.
As I was sitting in my chair thinking of the best places to call and from which
direction I would approach the thickets when I looked out the window and it was snowing very hard. I immediately turned on the Weather Channel and discovered we were supposed to receive six inches of snow! My enthusiasm was reinvigorated. The
tracking plan was now back in effect. As evening fell December 31st,
2000 I couldn’t stand the excitement. I just had to make one final evening
stand for the boar. There was 4 inches of snow on the ground and it was cold,
very cold. I thought maybe, just maybe the weather might cause the boar to make
a mistake and move before dark. Still no luck, he just wasn’t about to
move in the daylight. As I left my stand in the dark that evening I looked back
towards the woods filled with new snow and said to myself, “I’ll be back tomorrow and track you down.”
After getting out of bed New Years Day 2001 I quickly walked to the window and
looked outside, there was plenty of snow on the ground but none falling from the sky.
I was excited, I just knew this was the day I would finally kill the big boar.
As I was driving to my hunting area all sorts of things were running through my mind. What if it snowed all night and
covered up his tracks? What if his tracks lead me upwind of him and he smells
me? What if he didn’t show up at all last night? By the time I had
reached my hunting spot I had almost convinced myself the boar would outsmart me again.
Never the less, I had good tracking snow and all day so I was going to give him a heck of a try.
As I loaded my Remington Model 700 Classic chambered for 375 H&H, I decided
to remove the variable 2.5 X 8 power Leupold scope because I figure if I was lucky enough to get a shot at the boar he would
be close and possibly moving in heavy cover. Some say this cartridge is too large
for wild boar but this combination works for me. I shoot a 300-grain Hornady
roundnose handloads at 2,600 fps. and have found that this load doesn’t damage anymore meat than many smaller calibers
but definitely has it’s advantages in the thick brush. My rifle has a set
of Leupold quick release mounts which allows me to remove the scope when necessary and I have replaced the original front
sight with an oversized white bead and the rear sight with Remington’s express shotgun sight.
The sun was just rising when I began the short walk to the PVC feeder. It was cold and the six inches of snow was powdery which in my opinion looked like good tracking snow. As I reached the feeder there were tracks, lots of tracks made by the same big boar
I’d been hunting for so long. I was pumped!
I was finally going to get the chance to kill the big boar. Immediately,
I started tracking. The first trail led me to a shallow creek about two hundred
yards from the feeder and stopped. I figured he walked down the creek so I followed looking for his trail leaving the creek.
Fifty yards later with no sign of him I went back to the where his trail entered the water and notice he had turned around
and backtracked for fifty yards then started off through the woods. I thought
for sure I was on the right track this time, he was headed for a thicket and I just knew I would find him in his bed within
a few minutes. Fifteen minutes of tracking later I was at the feeder! I followed three more trails away from the feeder they all went about two-hundred yards turned around and
went back to the feeder. It was obvious to me now that the hog was keeping all
the other hogs out of the area by patrolling around the feeder all night. After
about two hours of this I started getting that sinking feeling of defeat in my stomach. He’s outsmarted me again! Not intentionally, but there are so many tracks and trails I thought it would be impossible
to sort him out without spooking him.
After resting a short while I found another set of tracks I hadn’t followed
and began the slow process of tracking and glassing. The trail lead away from
the feeder went about two hundred yards turned and started back to the feeder. I
immediately thought, here we go again back to the feeder. The trail led within
twenty yards of one of the trails I had been on earlier and was headed toward and open field about one hundred yards from
the feeder. I was tracking through some thin brush and could see where the hog
had rooted in the snow out in the field, as I was only about thirty yards from the tree line.
Thinking that he entered the field and went back to the feeder, not believing that this mysterious, smart old boar
would be bedded in such thin brush within sight of the feeder after all of my wondering around. I started walking at a normal pace along his trail. All of a sudden, I caught movement out of the corner
of my right eye. It was the big boar!
He was only twenty five yards away standing very still after rising out of his
bed. He was cold black and the frost was rising out of his mouth past his
gleaming tusks as he looked through the woods towards a spot I had been a couple of minutes earlier. I guess he was hoping I would keep walking and he could lay back in his warm bed but that wasn’t
happening. I had my rifle shouldered and sights on his chest when he bolted,
the big white bead settled perfectly in the shallow V of the express rear sight. The
rifle seemed to fire on it’s own as the boar went behind a tree, he stopped and seemed to stand still for a moment and
I thought I had hit the tree. He then slowly slumped in the snow with all four
legs under him as if he was still sleeping. The big 300-grain bullet had entered
his right side and exited the left side of his neck killing him instantly. As
I looked down at him I wondered why after all this time did he let me walk circles around him for two and a half-hours without
running. I was outsmarted again; he could have gotten away at anytime other than
at the moment he tried.
It was New Years Day and in my opinion a heck of a way to start the New Year.
Chris Fore
