Finally got a spare day when my son Bryce was also off work and keen for a hunt. I had worked through the night driving a milk tanker and finished early at 4 am so this would give me one hour sleep before Bryce would arrive. It felt like my head had just touched the pillow when Bryce arrived. I had no time to waste having breakfast so it was straight out the door with tracking collars on Fog and Lightning as well as Bryce’s young bitch Dusky. We left the block on the four wheeler and rode along the main road until we came to
the track that we were going to ride around. One hundred meters along and the three dogs started to show some interest in a scent that had gone through during the night. The scent was just not strong enough as the dogs were only tracking out three hundred meters before returning. I had a fare idea that the pig that the dogs were trying to track could be in the next gully over so we rode the bike up the track to the next intersection where we left the bike and walked up to the top of the hill. It was up here that the dogs tracked away across to the opposite
face into the native. Dusky had returned to us while Fog was out in front of Lightning. We could see on the tracker that Fog had done a circle in the native before breaking out around the hill below us. By the time we got back to the bike Fog and Lightning had gone around two gullies and were still heading away into some real shit country. We rode the bike around to where the dogs were and as we turned the bike off we could hear both dogs bailing just over three hundred meters away. With Bryce leading the way we headed straight down into this native gully then
up the other side. By the time we got up to where the dogs had been they were now still three hundred meters out as this boar was walking with them at the bail. This is where Bryce’s fitness started showing out as he started getting ahead of me. I could see that it would be easier going higher up in the mature pine trees. Dusky had been going to the other dogs but then returning to Bryce as she was obviously feeling a bit intimidated by this boar. I could see on the tracker when Bryce was closing in on the bail while I stayed up above him. He later told me that he was only meters from
the boar when Dusky grabbed a possum and the boar broke as soon as he heard her. As I headed towards the next bail I was left with no option but to head into the native and was crawling through some real crap when Bryce caught up with this boar. He said that as soon as the boar spotted him it raised its head and was about to bolt when Bryce shot it through the top of the head. We had a good carry ahead of us and we both knew that there was no way that we would be carrying this boar back out the way that we had just come in on. Instead once we had him gutted Bryce took the first carry straight up into the mature pines where it was much more open underneath. On my first carry we had come to an area where there were a whole lot of pines that had blown over and this was hard work climbing over them with 130 pounds on my back. One slip and I could have dropped up to two meters.
Once we got to the ridge we came across the old four wheel drive track so the carrying was not to bad for the next fifteen hundred meters. This track had a number of trees over it so there was no way that we could have got the bike up it. Finally we could put the pig down and walk the fifteen hundred meters back to the bike. None of the dogs received any injuries as the boar did not have very big tusks. Both tusks were growing straight out of the jaw at a low angle which meant that they would have grown right around under his tusks if he had got to live long enough.