I'd killed plenty of hogs before I finally got talked into my first dog hunt. It was a few yrs after high school, I was down on the gulf for a wknd of diving and my old friends talked me into an evening hunt. I'd never been interested in it, because I thought of hogs as "off" game... you know, how most still(deer) hunters look at them... "why do I want to chase a stinking pig?" I told myself...
"Oh well, at least I can drink a few while they mess around".... So this guy(whom I still hunt with to this day) shows up with a box full of dogs, I go up to look at them and one tries to take my finger off
... I'm like, "you're not
really gonna turn him loose with me right here are you??lol", he says, "oh, he won't mess with anybody once he's hunting" :
....We get to the spot, some cattle spread that had a decent # of pigs. Once he let the dogs out, I was immediately fascinated... These were the scariest bunch of dogs I'd ever seen, not to mention them all being loose around my legs. Scarred from head to toe,
big(70-80#'s), block headed yellow dogs... Simply beautiful animals, built for a specific job... I was already hooked..
Stuck a beer in each back pocket and off we went.. got the quick version of what not to do on the way in... you know, like "just stay out of the way, you'll get hurt" kind of stuff
... well, I've never been the type to worry about stuff like that so, the first bay everybody starts running towards... so I figure.. "must be a race...
", so off I went, beating everyone there by a long shot, and bailing in like a comakazi bulldog... head high palmettos thrashing around with dogs barking, hog huffing...
with absolutely no idea what I was gonna do next Well, I spot the hog, but having no idea what to expect, I didn't give the dogs time to catch and just grabbed at the boar's rear end(miracle I didn't get my a$$ handed to me)... well, the hog broke(surprise surprise :
) and the dogs ended up catching a couple shoats, but it was too late, I was hooked
deep. Been hunting for my next fix ever since...
