I have got this thing where a never work on my birthday. I believe that it is the one day of the year that belongs to each individual and no employer could pay enough to take that one day away from anyone. For me I just wanted to get out on the hill with my pig dogs and hope to catch an animal. Because I had been so busy lately I decided to go for a hunt where I thought my cows had disappeared to. I had three dogs with me Lightning, Fog and Thunder.
It was while I was moving up through some Douglas firs that I heard a branch brake so I went to investigate. As I got closer I spotted one of my cows making a bee line away from me. As she crossed the gully and headed up the other side she was joined by a couple more cows. Once I got them up against a fence line out in the open I had six cows with only three missing. The cows started acting quite strange at this place so I walked in to look at what had their attention. Their was a guts of a deer that someone must have shot within the last week. Every time I tried to push the cows further on they just kept on coming back to the deer offal. Rather than stir them up I jumped the fence with the three dogs and put them away down the gully beside me. They had a bit of a look around before coming back. When I returned to the cows the other three had also turned up so now I had all of the cows so I started pushing them down the hill towards the road. It was not long before Lightning and Fog disappeared around two gullies and became stationary on the tracker. I did not want to leave the cows where they were because they could have easily walked of and I would have had trouble finding them again so I persevered and pushed them another two hundred meters down the hill to where a four wheel drive track comes of. From I ran the 350 meters around to where the dogs had the pig.
Thunder was still with me until he heard Fog barking then made a bee line for them. I thought something was not quite right as Lightning was not barking but just standing there. As I approached from the road Thunder must have arrived as well and the pig tried to break so the dogs grabbed her as they fell down the bank onto the road then they stood back and bailed again giving me time to get a photo. When I started filming this sow she tried to charge me so the dogs pulled her beck off the bottom side of the road and bailed her in the creek. This is where I called the dogs into heel and let her go. The reason that Lightning was not barking at her earlier on was because the pig was a sow and he knew that I would only let her go any way. This sow was white and looked to have a lot of domestic pig in her so someone must have gone to the trouble of letting her go and our sport needs pigs like this to survive. When I had called the dogs off her she walked up the bank on the other side and looked back at me as if she was expecting me to give her some food. Hopefully next time she encounters dogs she may be a bit wiser.
Once I left her I jogged back to where I had left the cows and they were still there so I walked them down towards the fence before the road. Instead of them walking out through the gate they took off at a fast run up the old four wheel drive track away from the road. I managed to grab the last cow by the tail as she dragged me along the track through the other cows. She decided to turn around and head back down the track when she had passed all but two of the cows.
I new that I could not out run these two so I headed back to the road. I could hear the other cows running flat out around the road. I sat on the motor bike and waited on the last two to come looking for their mates. As they came out they sniffed the ground and knew exactly where the other cows had gone and took off at a run. It was two km around the road before we caught up with the first lot of cows and they were still running. They ran all the way to my gate before stopping and waiting for me to open the gate for them. My hunt could not have gone better, I had caught a pig which I don’t have to skin and bone it out. Have got the cows back and it was still only 11.30am. My next jobs were to move stuff from the hut up to the house and have a beer.