I'm a little late posting this, but, in mid March we headed down for our annual trip to Alabama to hog hunt. It was tough hunting this year, the pigs seems to be pretty spread out and we had trouble finding any sounders (only saw one, with about 15 or 20 pigs in it, hauling rear end down a creek bottom). Over all the weather was pretty good but had some rainy days mixed in. The first full day of our hunt, we had this guy come out of a small cave, tried to sneak out behind me about 40 yards away, I got off what I thought were 3 pretty good shots at him, turned out I grazed his rump one time
. This boar decided to cut straight up a gap in a rock wall where my buddy was waiting on top, he shot 5 times from 8-10 yards as the pig was coming right at him. He put a great shot on him the first time right in the neck and hit him again in the hind legs.
That's me posing with it, but I didn't inflict any serious damage. The next day it rained all day, we hunted hard all day and it seemed as though we couldn't catch up with any in the mud. We put in several miles throughout the day and our afternoon hunt left us a couple miles from the truck and soaking wet. By some miracle we found a "short cut" back to truck, that left us with about 1.5 hrs of daylight left. We sat at the truck worn out and contemplating just relaxing at the truck for a little bit before calling it quits for the day. I just couldn't talk myself into wasting the daylight and let the other two guys I was hunting with know I was going to wander off one side of the road a little ways and see what happened. I walked off the road a couple hundred yards and there was no hog sign whatsoever. It was cold, windy and rainy, so naturally I took a moment and thanked God for the experience, then turned around and headed back to the truck. I stopped by the truck, let my buddies know that the area I was just in looked no good so I was going to walk back a food plot on the opposite side of the road and sit for the remainder of the day. I made it about 100 yards down the food plot and cut a big hog track. It appeared as though it was made sometime during the day but it was tough to tell with all the rain we had received, but I had nothing to loose. I followed the track into the woods out onto a ridge, I could more or less see where leaves had been kicked up, then found a couple piles of hog scat. The ridge ended in a point covered in small pine trees, as I approached with the wind in my face I could see some old rubs on trees and a couple of ground scraps and thought to myself, this really looks like a great buck bedding spot (I can't shut it off
). I heard something take off running and I following, busting through the pines in the direction I heard the noise. I looked down in the creek bottom some 200-300 feet below me and saw a large pig headed down hill. I waited until it got into the creek and took a shot and hit well over top of the hog. The hog proceeded straight up the next ridge and I told myself to wait for him to get to the top and he would either cut right or left giving me a broadside shot or stop at the top to catch it's breath (it had just climbed a couple hundred feet straight up). As the hog got the crest of the ridge it stopped, basically in a vertical position, giving me the entire spine as a target, I settled my sights midway between the head and the shoulder blades and let my 450 BM bark. I almost couldn't believe it when I saw him just tip over. I hit more or less exactly where I was aiming from 150 yards or so from ridge to ridge, better to be lucky than good. (I do shoot a lot which no doubt helps)
The best part was the ridge he ran to was closer to the truck, only about 200 yards away. We tied him up to a log and made the short carry out, worked out great. And because I couldn't resist the next day I went back to check out where he was bedded and just like a buck, he was bedded about 1/3 down the ridge with this dead tree at his back, and he had made himself a little nest with the rotted wood off the bottom of the tree.
