Ghosts in a landscape
Ghosts in a landscape.
Pig hunting in local Cane fields is always hard, dogs need to use their noses and if they do locate something decent they need to jump on him, give these boars an inch and they take a mile.
Just getting one good boar alone, is a fairly good achievement.
I had done well last season, and was hoping for a repeat performance but it was not to be, mainly because of local trapping and your’s truly.
On one farm alone I had probably taken out a good 20 pigs and the trapping program had reduced it by another 60 or so..
At 7.30 pm I stopped off to pick up a mate that, owned a couple of Bull Arabs that were very handy indeed and only aided in the location of these smart Cane pigs.
We arrived at the farm at around 8.00 pm, slowly we crawled through a Banana paddock until we stopped not far from a Cane field.
A large boar had been coming in at irregular intervals, I had missed the pig on a couple of occasions so I was trying to even the score.
The boar had been coming through a large cattle paddock and crossing a drain, over the headland and in to the first paddock. Not eating there he would cut through the block, cross another drain and settle in to the next block.
This boar would come every couple of days then disappear for a couple, and this was making life hard for us, I was hoping that he would not end up inside a trap.
We crossed to the other side and would now attempt to ambush a pig on the Banana dump, these hogs just love these places especially if there is an abundance of rotten fruit.
Once again we pulled the vehicle up slowly, the less noise you make the better your chances are.
The both of us slowly made our way toward the dump, we tried ever so hard to keep quiet, but large banana leafs have a way of making quite a racket when you walk on them.
The dogs soon converged onto the dump, but all was quiet, all was not lost, there was a small block of Cane just up to our left, so not wasting any time we headed off.
It was Missy who was the first dog to locate the boar inside the Cane block. She let out quite a commotion then all was quiet, had the boar blown her off, 10 seconds later it started all over again, this time it sounded like the boar had settled into a fight.
By this time all the other dogs were pushing there way towards the commotion, as we were.
We stopped to listen, trying to get a good fix on where the dogs and pig were, it sounded like a couple of more dogs had now reached the boar.
As we reached the area, the dogs had the boar held fairly well, all though he was still pushing them up against the Cane stalks in an effort to push them off.
I slipped up along side the boar, there was not much room and as I was trying to stick the pig I nearly tripped up on a couple of occasions.
A couple more wild thrusts and the large boar lay dead.
The boar possessed good ivory, but none of the dogs had been injured, now was the fun bit, we grabbed a leg each and slowly pulled him out of the Cane, which can be tiring work. Once out of the Cane we estimated his weight to be around 80 kilo.
This boar was carrying the wounds of war, there were several large rips along his shoulders, which meant other good boars were in the area, we both were hoping to meet them on our next hunt.
Written by Rob Van Der Veen