Click Here For Part I

This is Dangerous

No sugar coating this one. This is not your average sit in a treestand and wait kind of hunting. This is the most dangerous type of hunting I’ve experienced to date. Hunting itself can be a dangerous activity, but I’ve never really been worried about a whitetail gashing my leg open with it’s G2 tine. That’s a concern when hunting hogs. Hogs are mean, nasty, aggressive, ill-tempered animals to begin with. Then you corner them with equally mean, aggressive, barking dogs while trying to get close enough to wrestle it on its side or stick it with a knife. All while avoiding the razor-sharp tusks that hang outside the side of its mouth. And those are just the dangers when you actually get a hog. Everything that leads up to that moment, poses it’s own risk as well.

Accept Your Environment.

My hog trips have always fallen during the month of August. If you have ever been down south during the summer months, you know August is about 1 degree shy of Hell and you wear the humidity like a coat. You’re going to sweat. And not just a little bit. I looked like had been running laps after I was done. It’s just something you accept and prepare for.  Accept that it’s gonna be 90º with a 1,000% humidity after the sun goes down. It’s part of it and just adds to the satisfaction of getting a hog.

Hogs like to run into the thickest, nastiest, muddiest, parts of a swamp. So if you want that hog, you have to go in after them. That means trekking through some of thickest South Georgia swampland mud in the pitch black of night. That headlamp I paid top dollar for, only took me so far. They are required to see where you are walking, but they also attract every gnat and fly in the swamp. Chances are you will inhale a couple of gnats when your sucking wind from the hiking.

Snakes are always a concern. It’s the swamp and they grow big in South Georgia. I hiked through plenty of knee-high grass and cut timber and that uneasiness never really went away.  Each step was preceded by a quick rustle of the grass with my hiking stick. We had a dog get snake bit on one outing, so, yeah, it was a concern. But snakes on the ground are not the only concern. I found out other snakes like to hang in tree limbs, so I have a good chance of pushing through some swamp brush and having a snake drop on my head. Needless to say, your senses are on full alert.

While I watched where I was stepping, I did walk through a few banana spider webs. They always liked to be face level. It’s also some of the strongest webbings I’ve ever felt. It was like a web made of fishing line. Although not overly venomous, it’s still a shock to walk through webbing that has the strength of carbon fiber. On one of our trips, our guide said to shine your light on that puddle. I did and saw thousands and thousands of glittering shimmers. “That’s cool” so I thought. I asked, “What’s that?” The answer; “Spiders dude. Thousands and thousands of spiders. Yeah, I squirmed a little bit.

This is hard work.

Many hunters say the real work doesn’t begin until you actually get something. No truer statement has ever been said. Any deer or elk hunter will attest to this. Packing out hundreds of pounds of meat can be exhausting for anyone in any terrain. It will take one experience of dragging a dead deer, to understand the sweat and effort involved.

The same amount of work applies to hog hunting if not more because of the amount of walking. The amount of hiking involved is staggering. Some of the cornfields we hunted were hundreds of yards in each direction. That involves a lot of walking in knee-high snake boots.

Imagine pulling a 200+ pound sack through knee-deep mud, brush you can’t see through and rooted-up holes that rival meteor craters. It’s like a country folk’s Ironman. That spin-class doesn’t hold a candle to the amount of cardio involved when dragging a 150 lb animal. Even the “easy” hogs had to be drug through freshly tilled farm dirt and waist high grass. It’s the equivalent of trying to run wind sprints on a sandy beach while wearing jeans. It was enough to make me double over and puke. Literally.