By Foster Huntington
I woke up at 2:25 a.m. and lay in my sleeping bag debating if I should get up or try to sleep for another hour or two before hitting the road. Originally my plan was to leave between four and five, throw my sleeping bag and pillows in the SUV, and make the 10-hour drive down through Bend and cut over past Mt. Shasta before humping down the I-5 to Sonoma County to meet up with Mike Odell and go hike around the mountains of the Coast Range of Northern California looking for wild boar. It was Christmas morning, and I hadn’t said my goodbyes the night before. No point in waking anyone this early, I thought to myself. If I leave now, I might be able to get there in time to look around and spot something.
My excitement got the better of me, and I left the snowy driveway of my mom’s boyfriend’s cabin on the Northside of Mt. Hood a few minutes before 3 a.m. and headed south. The roads were completely empty, save for the occasional snowflake as I crested Mt. Hood and headed down the pass towards the 97 and the east side of the Cascades. I listened to Zevon’s Learning To Flinch while Tim, my springer spaniel, slept in the passenger’s seat. I saw my first car on the straightaway before dropping down to Warm Springs.
Redmond and Bend were barely moving as I passed through at 5 a.m., and I felt a sense of calm as I drove through stoplights, usually teeming with adventurers at California’s northernmost beachhead, some 300 miles from their native border.
I crossed over into California in a mix of twilight, fog, and caffeine shortly after 7:30 and was eating lengua tacos for an early lunch at a truck stand off the I-5 at 11:00. By sunset, we were parked on a ridge overlooking a drainage and confirming zero on our bows.
Mike and I put in 10 miles on the first day, hiking around fire roads and through oak savannah. We saw lots of signs, tracks, rootings, and scat, but no pigs. As the rain picked up, we decided to call it. We had burgers at a French bistro in Sonoma. Dorned in camo, full from wolfing down a plate of fries and aioli sauce, I left an assortment of families enjoying steak frites with college kids back on break and various couples eating cheese plates to pull a tick out of my armpit in the bathroom.
In the back of the SUV, I lay balled up with Tim, as rain beat down on the moonroof. Despite my agreement with Mike that there weren’t enough pigs in the valleys to warrant hunting by walking fire roads and glassing meadows until we either heard or saw something, I had a burning suspicion that something was there.
Wild pig populations in Northern California, by all accounts, peaked in the mid-2000s, but date all the way back to the 1800s when Russian and Italian settlers brought pigs with them, and they inevitably escaped. The population really took a turn in the 1920s when hunters along the coast, from the Hearst Ranch to Vineyards in Napa and Sonoma, imported a few dozen European boars, and they bred with the native population of feral pigs to create a hybrid strain of super pigs. Everyone we talked to had a similar sentiment: “Yeah, there’s pigs up there, but you’re going to have to work your ass off. Those hills are steep. Shit, you should have been here 20 years ago. I’d see 50 pigs every time I glassed a hillside.”
These words echoed in my head as I tossed and turned in my sleeping bag. They reminded me of my days spent driving up and down the coast looking for secluded waves. Like in Endless Summer, I always heard the proverb, “You should have been here yesterday; it was all-time.” Well, I wasn’t here 20 years ago, and I saw a bunch of fresh tracks and signs by those three oak trees on the close ridge, I thought to myself. What else am I going to do, sleep in? Get coffee and a cookie at another bistro and pull another tick out of me with a Leatherman?
I crawled out of my sleeping bag and into the front seat shortly after 5, and with some snacks from a 7/11 and an energy drink I was back in the valley as the last stars were fading from the now-clear sky. As soon as I stepped out, strapped on my bino harness, and grabbed my bow, I heard the unmistakable sound of squealing in the woods to the north. Checking the wind and realizing it was in my favor, I headed up the hill to wait and see if I could spot where the noises originated.
In a burned-out slash pile, I sat as the distant squeals became closer grunts, and within minutes, the canopy of a bay tree rustled, and out popped the long black snout of a European-descendant boar. A dozen or so more pigs, including one dalmatian pig, followed and marched along the perimeter of the field. The lead pig stopped in an opening between trees and looked in my direction, smelling the air. Mistaking this pig’s actions for seeing me and recognizing the looming danger, I drew my bow and bypassed taking an accurate distance reading with my rangefinder. In the twilight, I estimated the distance the best I could, settled on my 35-yard pin, and placed it in the middle of the vitals. I broke the shot and sent the arrow high, cutting a little hair and putting the fear of death into the pig. The sounder scattered heading down the hill into the draw. As I turned to follow the group, a last pig, larger than the rest, emerged from the woods and followed slowly behind.
Instead of running after them, the boar marched broadside, and at about 45 yards, I knocked an arrow, drew my bow again, and placed my 45-yard pin on the edge of the boar’s chest. With a rifle, this hold would have been lethal, but with a bow traveling 1/10th speed, I had no idea and made my best guess. In the foggy twilight, I wasn’t able to see where the arrow hit, but I heard the unmistakable sound of a series of squeals and watched as the boar ran off after the sounder. Adrenaline surged through me at the excitement of my first big game encounter with a bow. I ran up searching for my arrow and any sign of blood. I found the arrow lodged into the ground behind the boar’s trail. I studied the blood and tissue on the expanding broadhead with the eye of a novice hunter. I took photos with my phone and immediately texted them to Mike, still asleep in his bed, and Trevor Gordon, asking if they could tell anything from the blood and tissue.
“That looks like a meat hit,” was the consensus from both Trevor and Mike. Walking back from the hole in the trees that the sounder disappeared into, I searched for blood along the trail back to where I took the shot. Between the arrow and my perch on the hill, I found the boars severed tail.
“What are the fucking chances of that?” I murmured to myself as I picked up the tail, rolled it over in my hand, and placed it in my pocket to ponder later. I tracked the pigs for the rest of the morning and trekked some 2 miles and 1500 feet of vertical changes. Occasionally, I spotted a drop or two of blood from the boar’s tail. The distance they covered and the terrain they marched through gave me a newfound respect and admiration for an animal that most people, hunters included, think of as a lowly pest. Following their trail through madrone bushes and over creeks, often crawling on my hands and knees, I replayed the morning’s actions, critiquing my failure to take my time and range my first shot and the hog fever that came over me and compelled me to take the second shot.
At the top of the next ridge, I glassed back towards the ridge I came from. In all likelihood the pigs, continued into the next drainage, the pig I shot, would undoubtedly survive with a cropped tail and a fear of the sound of a bow’s twang.
Now, just a week later, the boar’s tail sits in my fridge packed in a bowl of salt. I might hang it from my rearview mirror or make a keychain. Mike suggested that I send it into the Texas Department of Fish and Game and collect a $10 bounty. “Yeah, I sure could use some help offsetting the gas…” Regardless of what I do with the tail, it will serve as a reminder of the mistakes I made on my first bow hunt and the things I got right. Sometime in the next few months, I’ll head down to the Coast Range and see if I can find that boar with no tail and learn from my mistakes.
