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After finding Cambo's ram, David Simmons, Jerry and I rode
out with J.J. to find a place for them to set up.
Danny wanted to hunt my stand location from the previous
evening, number 15 1/2, and so I also had to find a new
location. Most of the activity had been on the west
side of the ranch, and I had originally wanted to stay in
that vicinity. However, after seeing the tracks at
the intersection of Deer Run road and Turkey Roost road, I
felt like it would offer an excellent opportunity for my
second, and maybe even third, hog. It was also near
a creek where the turkeys have been known to roost (hence
the name of the road, I suspect), so I thought I might be
able to call up a turkey as well. I set up my Brush
Country ICE Blind and a decoy, and then we headed to the
"Bass Pond" stand to find a place for Jerry and
David.
Having seen the area on Friday afternoon, I felt like
this would be a good spot for them to set up. The
corn from the previous evening had been completely wiped
out, and since cows can't access the area, it had to be
hogs. The fresh hog tracks in the wallow in front of
the stand reaffirmed our suspicion that this could be a
hot area. We set up the T5 ICE Blind that I had
borrowed from Kevin Johnson directly underneath the tripod
that was already in position. This would allow Jerry
to shoot from the tripod while David filmed from the
blind.
My original plan called for heading out to the blind
shortly after 5 p.m., but I wasn't able to make it back
until 6. That still gave a couple of hours of
daylight to attempt to call a turkey, or perhaps put one
to bed on the creek for tomorrow morning. We had
decided we would hunt until an hour and a half after dark,
then return to camp for an hour or so before heading back
out for the rest of the night. I sat in the blind
until 10 p.m.without seeing anything other than cows, one
of which seemed to take a special interest in my turkey
decoy.
I decided to go ahead and pick up Bill before returning
to get David and Jerry.
When I arrived at Bill's stand, only a few hundred
yards from mine, he told me he had a hog down. The
hog had pulled out about 300 yards of string tracker line,
but we were only able to find a couple of very small
splatters of blood. When the tracker line ended, so
did our hopes of finding the hog. We continued to
search for any sign of which direction the hog had
traveled, but were unable to find anything. Finally,
Bill called off the search and we drove to get David and
Jerry. Unfortunately, they had seen nothing.
Back at camp, we saw a group of hunters standing around
the skinning rack. We pulled up to see Danny, David
Inbody, Spur, Cambo and Bud admiring a hog hanging from
the rack! Danny had shot two pigs and immediately
recovered the first.
The second was not a pass through shot, so he
wisely returned to camp to form a tracking party.
David had shot a hog as well, and also decided to wait for
help before attempting to recover it.
Everybody in the group, except for Bud who stayed
behind to hold down the fort, rode out to join the
search. Like with Bill's hog, David's had pulled out
tracker line, but produced no blood. We fanned out
in different directions to look for any sign. It
wasn't looking promising until we heard Danny ask what
color the hog was, and upon learning that it was black,
confirmed that the one he had found must have been Dave's!
Dave, Chris and Bill stayed behind to gut the hog while
the rest of us walked to Danny's stand to begin the
tracking job for his. After Danny explained the shot
scenario and general direction, we began looking. It
wasn't long before David Simmons found the trail. It
was a good trail for a bit, but then began to grow
sparse. David demonstrated his superior tracking
skills, aided by his super-bright Stinger flashlight, and
followed the trail for several hundred yards, often
identifying drops of blood no larger than a pin
head. Despite a valiant effort, and a long, tedious
tracking job, it finally became evident that we would not
find Danny's second hog.
We returned to begin the cleaning chores on the two
hogs that were recovered..
By this time, it was almost 2 a.m. David, Jerry
and I decided to try to get back to our original schedule
and returned to our respective blinds, with Jerry and
David teaming up inside Kevin's blind. At 5:15 a.m.,
I couldn't sit any longer. We called it a hunt and
returned to camp to try to get a couple hours of
sleep.
At 8 a.m., Danny woke everybody up and said that Roy
and J.J. wanted us to do a drive in the hog pasture.
We fanned out across the back fenceline and pushed, hoping
to force the hogs to move from their beds. Only a
couple of hogs were seen, but Jerry managed to shoot a
pint sized hog, his first ever tradbow kill with his Bob
Lee bow! Congratulations Jerry.
With that, the hunt was over. It was a great hunt
and just about everybody had at least one opportunity to
see or shoot hogs! There were also a couple of
firsts, Cambo's first ever bow kill, and Jerry's first
ever tradbow kill! Congratulations to both for
highlighting this great hunt! As you might expect,
these guys are some die-hard hunters, and it was an
exhausting pleasure to try to keep up with them!
Thanks for a great hunt, guys!
I want to say thanks again to Roy for getting this hunt
together and convincing J.J. to allow us to hunt at a
discounted price!
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