How I Became A Hog Hunter

One day when Daddy was out working on the shooting range he came into the house and told Mommy that he thought he had just seen a herd of wild hogs running along the fence on the North end of the range. Mommy said "But Honey (that's what she calls him sometimes), we don't have any wild hogs in Minnesota". Daddy said "I know, that's why it was so weird". But he was sure he had seen SOMETHING, so he and Mommy went back to the range to see if they could see the hogs, or whatever it had been. There was no sign of them, so they decided to go over to the other side of the creek to see if they could find anything over there. When they got there they were amazed to find that over two acres of corn had been destroyed, by SOMETHING. They walked and walked and finally they heard SOMETHING. They stood very still, and finally, they saw a WILD HOG. Not just one, either. They counted one big old sow and TEN little baby pigs!

After they saw the hogs, Daddy and Mommy figured out that the sow was someone's domestic hog which had gotten out of her pen and run away from home, probably when she was about to have her babies. She had taken up residence in our corn field and eaten and eaten and eaten, until she ate up over two acres of corn. Daddy and Mommy realized that they had to get the sow out of the field before she damaged any more corn, especially since that field was leased to another farmer and it was HIS corn she was eating. They tried and tried to catch her, with no luck. She was too wild and kept running away. Finally Daddy decided to shoot her. Mommy said that she never intended for me to hunt hogs, 'cause she doesn't want me to get hurt, but she said it was okay for me to try to TRACK the sow. Since the cornfield was sooooooo big, over 30 acres, it was really hard for Daddy to find that sow in all the corn. Mommy put my green tracking harness on me one day and we all went out to the field together. Daddy took me to where he had last seen the sow and told me to "FIND THE PIG". Well, back then I was just a little puppy and I didn't even know what a PIG was. But I could sure smell something stinky, so I put my nose down and started tracking, just like when we played the tracking game. I tracked and tracked and tracked, and I finally found that old sow and her babies, right smack in the corn. Mommy took me away then because she did not want me to stand next to Daddy when he shot the gun. He was using his 45/70 and it was the biggest, loudest gun I had ever been around. Mommy and me went back to the house to wait. After awhile, Daddy came back and said he had shot the sow but she had run off into the corn. Mommy decided to let me track her again, so we went back to the field. Daddy showed us where she had been standing when he shot her, and he found a little drop of blood on the ground. He pointed to it and told me to "go find". Well, I had never smelled blood like that before, but I could follow the blood trail just like any other trail we had been practicing, so I took off after her. Mommy had my long check cord attached to my harness so that she could stay close to me, just in case.

Pretty soon, I got to where that old sow was hiding in the corn. Daddy caught up to us and Mommy pulled me back again, away from the noise of the gun while Daddy shot it. He made a good shot and that sow fell right down on the ground. Then Daddy took my picture next to the hog with Mommy, even though she wasn't the one who shot it. That afternoon Mommy and Daddy took the sow to the meat processor, and a couple of weeks later, we had a freezer full of pork! Mommy was SO proud of me for tracking that hog, and she just kept telling me what a GOOD PUPPY I was.