Bryce was keen to come up for a night hunt as it was also a full moon. Bryce’s bitch Dusky is still out of action after her run in with the 188 pound boar so we were going to just use my two dogs Fog and Lightning. The day before this hunt I was out on the hill when I spotted a black pig with two white front feet trying to sneak out along the gully. He had heard the four wheeler as I tried to get in front of him. As I came back into the gully the pig that I thought was only about ninety pounds was making good time trying to get away from me. As I got the two dogs down into the gully Fog saw the boar eighty meters away. At this point I was confident that the pig was as good as in the bag. Fog went into a patch of bush about thirty seconds behind the pig and when he came out the other side he was about a minute behind. Some how the pig had gained on him. By this time Lightning was also tracking the two of them. Rather than follow them I ran back to the motor bike and headed in the direction of the dogs. When I turned the bike off and started walking I did not get far when Fog quite causally walked back to me as if there was no pig around. Lightning was also tracking back towards us. When I looked at the GPS I could see that the dogs had gone into a step part in the gully then turned around and tracked back to me so this pig must have jumped down some bluff system.
So here was Bryce and I the next night riding the bike out towards where I had last seen the black pig with white front feet. On the way Fog caught a pig that sounded to be about fifty pounds so I gave the dogs a tone on the collar and they returned back to us without harming that pig to much. When we were about to go over the top on the bike I stayed back and let Bryce walk down the track for about one km giving the dogs time to work right down to were I had lost the pig the day before. All this time the dogs just did not seem interested. On the way back Bryce said that he would do another walk out in the block beside the track while I waited back on the bike until he was well ahead. He got out to three hundred meters when Fog tracked off up into the hill above. I think that the pig must have been in this gully as Fog stopped for almost a minute with out a bark which is what he normally does to settle a pig down before starting to bail. When he took off out of the gully he was covering a good twenty meters every 2.5 seconds until he got out to seven hundred meters and put up a real good bail. From where I was I knew that it was a waste of time me trying to run to this bail as Bryce was already three hundred meters in front of me so I just sat back on the bike and listened to that great sound of a dog bailing a good pig. I watched the GPS as Lightning closed in on the bail.
He slowly approached the last couple of meters and joined in with out putting any extra pressure on the pig. I had Bryce’s hand piece paired with mine so I could see him closing in on the action. From where I was I could see Bryce’s torch turn on then a shot ring out almost at the same time. The barking stopped as soon as the shot went off so I knew that Bryce had hit the pig so I rode the bike along the track to the closest place that I cold get for the carry out. Bryce shot this pig at 2.15 am and said that the dogs had him bailed real nice in some matogouri and he got a clean shot into the barrows head as he was a boar with no nuts and it was probably the same pig that I saw the day before but it was a bit bigger than I thought. It was easy to tie a piece of string around the pigs jaw and drag him down off the hill down to the creek. Bryce had a carry up from the creek to the bike and he thought that it was over 140. Back at home he went 156 on the scales so we got a quick photo then Bryce headed home as it was now after 4 am and Bryce had jobs to do that day.