Three Rights Make a Left

A Spring Hunt

I love hunting more than just about anything. It isn’t just the hunting I love as much as it is an excuse to spend time with family and friends that I love.

A little over a week ago a post popped up on Facebook that an exotic game ranch had a hog problem and was offering a very reasonable price to hunt feral hogs. Texas has a huge hog problem with domesticated pigs that escape farms and become wild. They can grow to be huge. Big ones can run hudreds of pounds. They tear up fields digging for roots, and they tear up fences. That is a particular problem for an exotic game ranch because when they tear up a fence, valuable game gets loose. I’m not one that would ever spend money to hunt exotic game, because they are contained within a high fence. It just doesn’t appeal to me as a sportsman. Wild game is a different story. I contacted the ranch manager, and he told me the hog hunt would be on the cattle ranch portion of the ranch that has a low fence. He said that if we didn’t kill a hog, we didn’t have to pay. That was too good a deal to pass up. He also said that they were just starting up the hog hunts and we would only be the second hog hunt they were booking.

The ranch was only about 45 minutes from my son TJ’s home in Jerrell, Texas, north of Austin. I drove down on Saturday morning and rode with TJ to meet the ranch manager for lunch. When we got to the ranch, we found they had a gun range so we were able to sight in our rifles. We hadn’t shot them in a couple of years and found that they were barely off and after a few shots they were grouping in the middle of the bulls eye.

The two guns we chose to use were the Remington Medalion 308 my dad had left me, and the AR 15 6.5spc I built myself. My AR has an extra long barrel for long range shooting, the perfect weapon for hog hunting.

We got in the blind about 4:30 while our guide headed out in his 4 passenger 4 wheel drive buggy, to set up a corn feeder in another location. By a little after 5 he came rolling back and asked if either of us knew how to set the timer on the feeder. I told him that TJ is a timer setting savant. TJ got in the vehicle and went with the guide. Twenty minutes later they came back. TJ had not only set the timer but also set up and programed two trail cameras. The guide spread some corn in the field in front of us even though there was a corn feeder set up 100 yards away.

We didn’t see anything. The guide had given us a green spotlight that attaches to a gun scope for night hunting which is legal for hogs so we put it on a gun. Then TJ told me something that got me excited. He said the guide told him that there are exotic game ranches all around the area and game gets out of the pen all of the time. He said if we saw any exotic game we could go ahead and shoot it. THAT my friends, was an interesting proposition. Successful exotic hunts can cost as much as $25,000 and as I said hunting an animal in a pen doesn’t hold any appeal to me. But species in the wild that aren’t native to Texas is another story.

When it got too dark for me to see, TJ said, “Look under the feeder.” I couldn’t see a thing, so I looked through the scope. TJ shined the green light on the feeder (which isn’t supposed to spook hogs). There under the feeder was a huge hog. However, we had to scramble to put our hearing protection on and, by the time we got set up, the hog was gone.

We stayed another hour past dark and the guide picked us up and proceeded to drive for miles around the place, but all we saw were cows.

The best part of the deal was that if we didn’t shoot hogs we didn’t have to pay. So, after I gave the guide a generous tip, TJ and I headed out. The best thing I got out of the deal was a memory of getting to spend a day of hunting with my son TJ.