Close call while hunting

Wow- where do I start on this adventure! Well, my wife and I decided to sneak away for a weekend w/o the kids to join GWS on this north FL hunt. My wife is a big outdoors gal, but likes taking in her "hunts" from relative comfort! I was a little worried about how she would take hit, but she had a blast!! Thanks to Frank King for all the work he did putting this together and I enjoyed meeting some new folks from this site.

On day one, we had a big crew of men and dogs, so Mr. Buddy tells me to suit up Chopper and take him and the yellow dog to help in the training in my 2 pups. I took him up on his offer and we rode for a while before we found a spot that had some fresh sign. Since my young pups don't have range yet, I wanted to get as close as I could. Our first drop and we walk in to a swamp about 200 yards when old yella dog strikes and we see shoats scattering. We also saw a wild turkey hen up close and personnel when she flushed from nest in our feet. We both needed new underwear after that! Well old yella dog takes one of my pups with her on a 700 yard run when the sow makes the mistake of running into an area covered by GWS and other hunters with a whole bunch of dogs. That hog did not make it out of gauntlet!

The next day we had a very laid back and late start. After covering a lot of ground with nothing to show for it, we decided to road for some fresh sign. We come up on "The Beast" which is what I call Buddy's big Honda. I call him to find that he is alone and several miles away. We agree to have one of us drive his ATV towards him as he is deep in a creek bottom hunting hard. We arrive at the homesite of the landowner to get out and try to locate a good location on GWS. We kill the bikes to hear dogs in hot pursuit of something directly below us in a bottom. I call GWS to ask if they would be on a deer since they are moving so fast, it was incredible the amount of ground these dogs were covering. Of the 3 Jags on this track, I only had one (Bart) on my GPS. We never saw the boar, but we saw the dogs only 100 yards below us, so we told GWS we were staying with them and moving around via the roads on the property to close in since we could not get down this "mountain" without rappeling gear!

We get on another road and immediately see 6 deer cross 20 yards from us. I am sitting there completely astonished that Bart would be running a deer and thinking how bad his "correction" will be when I inform GWS. Well, soon after the deer crossed and the dog never showed, I realize that the dog is not on a deer, they just got in the way of a running boar and were escaping the comotion. I get to the end of the road where the property line ends to see another slope only describable as a "dangerous decent" to get down. We park, get Chopper on lead, and head down the hill where level ground and the dogs are located.

Here is where it gets funny! Halfway down, I notice a flat spot of ground with a fresh boot print. We stop to notice it is a hiking trail cut into the side of this "mountain" and is marked w/ paint on the trees. I immediately tell her we will take this trail down to the bottom, then cut over to the bay. The dogs have now been bayed for about 10 minutes when I hear people talking! I look up to see a middle age man and his tree hugging wife coming down the trail - complete with hiking sticks and sweaters tied around their waist! It was funny to see the look on their faces when they run across a husband/wife team in rubber boots with a cajun accent and firearm, holding a mean looking 100lb pitbull in a kevlar vest!!!!

I inform them of our intentions to get down this hill and polietly ask them to keep a lookout for a boar with dogs attached to his rear end. This city slicker's wife will have nothing to do with that and promptly does a 180 degree turn and leave, all the while we are still freaking out we met someone else this deep in the woods! We make it to the bottom and are 200 yards from the bay. We make our way through the woods and I checked my GPS multiple times, still showing Bart holding his position. We get 65 yards from the bay, still can't see the dogs and cut Chopper loose since I can no longer hold him. The sound that was made when he hit that hog will not soon be forgotten. We arrive to find him latched on to a big boar, which I originally thought was a sow since I did not see any cutters and this pig was fat like a south LA sow. I leg the pig, then kneel on it while I get prepared to dispatch it. Chopper still has the boar by the ear and Bart was playing his best to be a catch dog at this point also. I am in the process of getting my knife out when the pig gets up on all 4's while my 220# fat a$$ is on top of him! My wife thought things were getting bad and offered to shoot him, but I reminded her I was sitting on him!!! She held offf on the trigger and I was able to put a knife to him thanks to my best friend Mr. Chopper!!!! I am entirely too old and too out of shape to rodeo wild boar any more!

The only thing funnier than seeing the faces of those hikers was trying to see my fat butt get back up that mountain!!!! Had a blast and can't wait to do it again!!!!