Last weekend after a very long time away from the field I went hog hunting in Texas. This trip was quite awhile in the making, I was trying to coordinate with folks to get down to do a trip and I was hoping to do Missouri as it was closer and cheaper, but the group lollygagged and we ended up losing that spot, but the texas trip came about fairly soon.

The trip down started at 10 P.M. the day before we were to get there, it was a 13 hour drive with minimal stops and very little sleep for me. We hunted for 2 days, mostly 2-10.

I was impressed by the accommodations and the area we were hunting, the guide had multiple areas with hog blinds and feeders, the hogs were plentiful and on the first night I shot 6 and the other two in my group each shot 5. We had the mistake of thinking we were going to be able to butcher 15 hogs in a night, honestly we probably could have had we known we were going to need to bring equipment with us to handle the butchering, but after my knife broke and forced me to use my back up hog knife which wasn’t very sharp and just plain being exhausted from the drive down we all got tired and had to leave 5 hogs un processed, this has actually bothered me greatly this week, I feel I have failed the animals whose lives we took to feed out own families, I’m sure this will stick with me for a bit, i think the fact that this does bother me is a good thing, it means I remember the value of all life and I can handle this guilt, it’s good guilt. The second night we all agreed to only shoot one hog, one of the group shot 2, I did shoot the largest boar of my weekend, and hit him perfectly in the head and he dropped like a stone. we opted to let the guides quarter these hogs for us best 40 bucks (35 but I had 2 20’s and didn’t really care about the change) I sat on a chair and watched them cut apart my pig. I was conflicted I wanted to bring the head home so I could mount the skull, but Mrs. ZM told me we didn’t need any more skulls, and i wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to get if home so I left it behind, I tried to get the tusks out but again lacked the tools for the job. when we got back to the bunk house we started to package the meat and were up until 2 am cutting and packing meat before I was sent to bed as I was driving first thing in the morning.

The next day we were packed and out the door by 8:05 and were on our way! until 30 minutes into our trip we had to turn back to pick up an item that was left behind.
So then we were on the road at 9:10 A.M!

I decided to drive the whole way home, likely out of sheer Irish stubbornness, but also because I didn’t like how one of our number drove my truck going down, we arrived back in the Twin Cities at about 9:30 and i divided up the hog meat and went back to my house and after a shower a well deserved bed time.

In hindsight I think I needed this trip to remind me that I can still do many of the things I did before, granted I may have trouble if caught on the ground by an angry hog, but I planned ahead by bringing a little to much gun, something that can penetrate the head of a hog and can shoot at a rate that makes rapid follow up shots easy, I also had a very +P 357 magnum round that kicks like a mule normally but will also drop a hog.

I am slowly getting better, the weather is warming up around here so hopefully I can get out and do more things outside.

We shall see