Managed to get out on a hunt with my buddy Jake on Saturday. This place isn’t hunted much and is usually loaded up with pigs so I was hoping for some numbers. My Copper dog is in heat so I brought Hopper, Punk, and decided to bring my 3 pups that I kept off Hopper X Copper. I really wasn’t planning to start the pups until the beginning of March but I figured this spot would be one of the better opportunities for them as a lot of the hunting we do is very hit or miss on finding the pigs and it seems like we have more dry runs than anything. It’s very frustrating and makes it hard to get dogs going but we work with what we’ve got. The pups are 5 months old right now. They have seen a small pig in a pen about 4 weeks ago but didn’t show any interest, so I figured they might just need more time or they might need to see a pig on a real hunt. Jake brought his Roscoe dog, a young female he got from me, a green bulldog, and another barely started dog.
Right off the rip we see some rooting but it’s a few days old. We were in some pines on high ground where you normally always will find pigs laid up, made it through that section and didn’t come across anything. On the other side of the pines there is a dike that cuts to the left and goes through some swamp. If you take that over you get in to a lot of high ground. On the dike there was a lot of fresh rooting but the dogs kept acting like they wanted to go off the side of the dike in to the water. With us having young dogs and knowing that if they did get in that swamp they more than likely wouldn’t stop anything, we pushed them down the dike on to the other side. We checked a lot of that high ground with no luck.
Jake was on a time limit and needed to be done within the next few hours so I told him that I wanted to go back across the dike and keep pushing the way we would’ve went if we hadn’t made the left turn on to the dike, and that if we didn’t have luck there we would call it. My last few hunts have been dry runs and I was really wanting to get in some fresh sign that the dogs could work. Hopper is doing very well for a younger dog but he’s not progressing how I know he can, and that’s simply because I’ve had trouble getting him near pigs so he’s having a lot of dry runs. Not to mention I really wanted the pups to see a caught hog.
Well it was 15 minutes after we get going through that section and we start seeing a little bit of rooting. We were in an area that was a lot of tall weeds or saw grass, when all of a sudden we hear a hog grunting. The dogs had been hunting pretty good and cutting loops, and I really hadn’t been paying attention to my garmin for a few minutes as I was trying to figure out which way we should go to avoid some water. I look at it and I see Hopper and Punk are showing caught around 280 yards. Jake’s son Jacob was with us hoping to stab a pig for the first time so I tell him to come on and start booking it to the pig. Well we have 10-15 shoats come running past us, the pups and a couple of young dogs barking and running around a little confused, I think from the amount of noise and commotion that was going on. Well we hear the caught hog break so we wait for a second and listen, I see punk is moving, I’m assuming she’s behind the hog that broke. Hopper starts coming back towards me and I see him zip by right where the shoats passed us, then all of a sudden he loops back around and catches a good little sow by himself, I guess she must’ve tried to hide when everything scattered. So Punk comes back to him and catches; we start moving to it and all my pups run to it as well as Jake’s bulldog.
Get there and show Jacob how to kill it, and the pups started baying, then after a minute my two male pups started biting and catching on it. The female
Just watched them from a few feet away, looking back and forth at my like she was unsure about things. She has seemed like a very smart pup, I believe she will kick it on after a few more pigs. With them only being 5 months I don’t have any real expectations for them, I’m letting them progress at their own speed and just watching and observing them, they’ve got a little while to go before I really start getting critical with them.
After we kill it we check to see where Jake’s Roscoe dog and his Coco dog are. Coco is at 315yds and Roscoe is stretching out through the swamp. Hopper, punk, and the bulldog didn’t want to come off the dead pig so I told Jake we could just leave them to go ahead and get to Roscoe because he will try to catch anything he stops. We were coming up to Coco on the way, and heard her baying, she went 85yds further and was baying again, then the hog hit the water and lost her. She came back to us and we were working towards Roscoe, he was showing caught at .66 from us.
Some knee deep water with lots of called timber started slowing us down and after 30 minutes he ended up coming back to us. He was limping pretty good so I think he either got whooped by a big sow in the group, possibly the first one that three Hopper and Punk, or else he probably killed whatever he caught after fighting it. If it was a bigger pig he may have drowned it with all the water that he was in. By this time Hopper had caught up to us, Punk was still back there at the pig and we thought the bulldog was as well.
We get back towards the dead pig and Punk had started trying to track us so I call her over. We get there and can’t find Jake’s bulldog anywhere. He’s about a year old and had been on a couple of pigs and was doing well. He hasn’t really left Jake’s feet while hunting unless he hears a bay or a caught pig so Jake didn’t have a tracking collar on him since he’s had a few get broke and is short. I have several friends that don’t collar their young dogs when they’re first starting them if it’s a bull dog or something that won’t get out too far, and they’ll normally pack up with the other dogs and don’t have any issue. Well something made him leave, I’m guessing he started trying to find us and may have gotten lost. We tried to find him and ended up having to leave empty handed. Went back on Sunday and looked all day and never did find him. Jake is planning to go back when he gets off work for the next few days. Hopefully it’s been cold enough that the gators aren’t really up and moving around, plenty of water for him, and some high ground he can get on to stay dry and warm. We are hoping he shows back up as he was coming on pretty good. There have been several dogs that were eaten by gators in there, so that may have been the bad luck unfortunately. Jake will be buying more tracking collars now, that’s the reason I won’t run anything without one. Not knowing what happened is what bothers me.
I was happy to see the dogs make it happen with one confirmed kill, and the pups did great with the water and with keeping up. I was disappointed though that the dogs did not try to relay out on the shoats that left past us. My only real complaint with these dogs right now is that I’m having a hard time getting them to relay and keep hunting after a pig is caught. But, after losing my team last year, I’m finally starting to get a yard together again, and this time I plan to set myself up where if a dog or two gets killed I’m not back to square one. Here’s a few pics from the hunt and a few pictures of my female pup, Sassy
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