Day in the life of a pig hunting author
The pig sign on the narrow river flats was all old. The rooting had a crusty look about it that indicated it had been weathered by a downfall of rain and a few high-country frosts. The only fresh scuffs in the black soil hereabouts were the skid-marks of red and fallow deer as they’d played in the chill of night.
At the end of the flats, in a corner by the gate, a merino sheep had recently died. It was here that my interest was piqued. The sheep’s carcass had been neatly separated into three piles. Topside was its pelt. Middle was its spine, pelvis and ribs. Bottomside were a couple of its lower legs. All the bits from the middle were missing.
The ground was frozen too hard to give up any clues regarding the size of the sheep-eater’s prints, but I could hazard a guess that it wasn’t a weaner. It takes a decent set of chompers to bust ribs and leg bones. It also takes a decent-sized stomach to contain a sheep’s insides and all its flesh, too. The leftover intestinal content, smears and splatters of green sludge, were not yet frozen so I was very interested indeed.
Ten minutes and half a kilometre later, my young finder, Pearl, began to cast in ever-increasing sweeps. Amidst the deer trails and the bunny holes was an erratic scent trail that she was working hard to follow. Back and forward, back and forward she went through the matagouri and blackberry till she found what she wanted. Once she locked onto the fresh tracks of the sheep-eating boar she didn’t dally, splashing through the river and then up a steep face.
Once Pearl tracked up and over the ridge ahead of me, I lost visual contact. Now it was time to eyeball the tracking gear. Her red line raced out through a mānuka face, looped back, did a sharp turn downhill and then she came up treed. She was too far away to hear, but my second dog beetled off, following the same scent trail as Pearl had, climbing higher and higher.
I crossed a tributary of the main river and looked with dread at the steep face ahead. Before I started the slog, I checked my receiver again. Pearl had moved, straight-lined from the original bail site to the main river directly below. Bad for her because this waterway is deep and dangerous. Good for me because now I could hurry around the bottom of the mānuka hill instead of ascending it.
After a lot of duck-puddling and rock-hopping up the side of the river, I heard an echo of a bail. Gin, the old second dog had just come back to me, so together we listened, trying to pinpoint the source of origin. It was hard to decipher with the bouncing echo and the roar of the river, but I thought Pearl was in a clump of mānuka on the other side.
Gin got swept down river, dogpaddling desperately till she got into a back-eddy where she could scrabble over the big boulders to a small beach. I was better off as I could pick my path and keep my feet, but it was still hip-deep and treacherous. Gin and I both hauled ashore eventually and hurried towards Pearl’s bark. We got closer only to find that she was not in the mānuka island at all, but back on the other side, perched precariously at the bottom of a rugged rock outcrop.
Back I went. First wading the river, then clambering up around its flood ravaged edge till I was above Pearl and her quarry, a young blue boar. He was standing up to his belly in the water and shivering visibly. (It had been minus two degrees when I left the truck, there was ice everywhere and the torrent started its journey not far from here, as snow on the mountains). It was not just the boar that was shivering, both dogs shook and shuddered, and I was almost as blue as he was.
A quick head-shot took care of business, then I scuttled into the bloodstained backwash to grab Boris. Typical head-shot animal, he bucked and thrashed, drifting out into the swift current. I had to hurriedly get a grip and haul him in before he washed away.
On a mossy ledge I disembowelled Boris then strapped his fore and hind feet together to transform him into a lice-ridden backpack. I’d already carried my rifle and gear back up the rock face to the terrace, now I only had to reverse into the straps and I’d be racing. I did my best Spiderwoman impersonation, crabbing up the near vertical face using finger- and toeholds. All the while the bullet hole in Boris’s forehead leaked a thick warm soup of blood and brain matter. It splattered down my front and over my hands till it looked like the pig and I had both been shot.
Now there was only one way outta here, and it entailed forging the river once again — this time with Boris on my back, so he went for another swim too, tethered to me with a piggin’ string around his nose. He was sodden inside and out, leaking blood and ice-water like a sieve.
A mildly abbreviated chapter taken with kind permission from the new hunting book Hog, Dogs and a Rifle by Kim Swan (Bateman Books, $39.99), available in bookstores nationwide.
