So I woke up today without too many plans, it was supposed to be stormy again so I was just going to lay low. I turn my phone on for the day and about 15 minutes later I get a call from Tom (My wife's one and only hair client right now). He says "Hey, I just shot a pig. Do you want it?" Ummm, hell yeah, let's do this! I hadn't had breakfast or anything but I throw on some clothes, grab my machete, an assortment of knives, cordless sawzall and whatever else I could think that I might need to butcher this hog. Now, I have never been hunting nor have I ever butchered an animal so this was the start of an adventure.
Hop in the truck with just my morning dose of caffeine and head down the road about 5 minutes to the 5 acre property to meet Tom. He shows me the blood trail, where his arrow landed and where the pig ran into a hog run through 8' high thick grass. "I usually just crawl on in there and start following the blood. It is actually kind of fun." he says. He must have seen my look, "Or you can just chop your way through with a machete.", he added. That's my plan! I gear up and start hacking my way through but realized the difference between a sort of sharp machete and an actually sharp machete. Unfortunately for me I only had the former. So down to hands and knees I go, I start crawling the grass tunnel and I only got about 30' in when I didn't see any more blood spots. Hmmm, I looking and looking and then I see what looked like a black rock from around the next big clump of grass. Wait a minute that ain't no rock, that's a hoof! Holy shit! I found it! I crawled back out to retrieve the rope to drag this fucker out of the grass tunnel to the other part of grassy ground. I finally got her out to where I could get a good look at her. An 80+ pound Sow with teets just brimming with milk. Tom says, "You can just load her up in the truck and take her." I said "My wife isn't going to be happy if I bring this big fucking thing home like this." Hinting to him that I am going to need to do whatever I have to do here and leave the mess behind. So he went off to set everything up to do the work behind my truck.
I am about 700 yards or so from where he set up the tripod hoist and my truck. It took me about an hour over rough terrain with this thing banging it's head off of every rock and hide just getting caked in mud. HAHA! Fuck me. I was reminded of no breakfast. Tom helped me with the last 100 yards or so that was mostly a gravel incline but fresh legs with my tired ass made it a dig to keep up with him.
I finally get her up on the hoist, I did miss getting behind the Achilles on one leg the first go around and she took a tumble, and the legs aren't long enough to get her airborne. Well shit, too late to turn back now. So I get to work skinning her, I know I am supposed to go down the center for a typical skinning job but what does one do when there are like 10 titties in the way? So I ended up cutting down each side of the teets and then get behind them to cut the whole slab down. The innards came out fairly easily although I did tell him that we either need longer legs on the tripod or shorter pigs because it was a bit more difficult that it needed to be. The heart was shattered into about 6 or 7 pieces from the arrow shot and that made the finding easy for me.
All in all it took me about 3 hours to get her all cut up, into a cooler and dispose of the parts and pieces there on the property back into the tall grass. Quite an experience and one that I will do again. Tomorrow I am going to trim up all the meat and get a final tally of how much I was able to harvest then get some on the smoker to make sure that I even enjoy eating wild boar.
The big takeaway for me was Field Dress for the win. Next time, Next time!
