wild hog – April Coker, Author

(Mis)Adventures in Deer Hunting (Part 2)

So sorry to keep you waiting!
After hearing about that near death experience with wasps, I’m sure you’ve been on pins and needles waiting to hear the rest.
Okay, you win.
Here goes. . .

I wish I could say I saw the biggest buck

I’d ever seen and proceeded to prepare him

for dinner but it wasn’t to be so.

After Hubby and I had settled down from the mass murder of the wasps, we waited for the sun to come up.

It’s my favorite part of the hunt, actually.

You really can’t see anything, but the woods are anything but quiet as the world begins to wake up and get ready for the new day.

Hubby’s ears were tuned for the tell-tale sounds of wildlife while I just tried to sip my coffee in the dark without spilling it. #lovemystanleythermos

“Did you hear that? Look through your scope,” he whispered. “Over to the left. There’s something under the feeder.”

“What is it? How am I going to see anything?” I whispered back.

“I put that light on your scope. Just press the end of the cord with your thumb.”

Easy for him to say. I finally figured out how to hold my rifle while pressing on the little pad that turned on the infrared light.

To my amazement I found the source of the noise Hubby had heard.

A wild pig was enjoying his breakfast, gobbling up the corn dropped by the deer feeder about 30 yards from us. His eyes glowed eerily in the red light.

If you know anything about wild hogs, you know that they are multiplying like crazy and decimating crops and ruining landscapes.
They compete with other animals for food and threaten their habitats.
Like rodents, they need to be eradicated.

But in spite of all that, the little guy was kind of cute gobbling up that corn.
Responsible me took aim behind its eyes, and after several seconds, fired.

And missed.

Seriously?
I can’t believe I missed. Later in the light Hubby looked all around for evidence of a kill, but there was nothing.
And we saw nary a deer that day.

Oh well. . .maybe next time.
Dumb little pig.
Or dumb hunter, smart pig.
And super smart deer.

Stay tuned.

XOXO

Home Butchering Ain’t for Sissies. . .

It’s been awhile but I promised to talk about our hog butchering, home edition. It wasn’t pretty.

We brought my first kill home, along with her piglet, and as I was inside searching the phone book for a meat processor with late hours, hubby was outside in our carport with mama pig across his open pickup tailgate, cutting into her tough hide to start transforming her into pork chops.

Before I could stop him, he was bringing into my clean kitchen pieces of fresh pork that I was supposed to package up and place in our freezer. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but as I began to place each piece onto freezer paper, I almost gagged when I realized that there were still coarse black hairs attached. Yuk! So I swallowed the bile and picked the hairs out of the meat until it looked clean enough to wash and wrap up.

The dutiful huntress and wife placed all packages in a freezer container which went into the back of the freezer until I had the stomach to bring it back out for cooking.

Unfortunately, over a year has passed and I haven’t had the urge to bring it out. Now it is too old and needs to be thrown out! I was never able to forget the smell of that pig and the nasty coarse hair on my countertops. She should have joined her little piglet offspring in the field as a free meal for nature’s predators and decomposers. Better yet, we should have left her where she dropped.

But it was a learning experience. When I get the taste for pork again (if ever), I’ll buy it from the grocery store already cleaned and packaged.