I was contacted by Ron Heemi who lives in Timaru. He booked a guided hunt with me, not just for the buzz of going for a hunt but to also put some meat in his freezer as the price of meat now is so expensive.
Ron arrived just on daylight all ready to catch a pig. For this hunt I was taking Bro and Gus. I had contacted two local landowners the night before to let them know that I would be on their properties. The plan was to ride the 4 wheeler to their blocks then walk from there. When pig hunting things don’t always go to plan. We were only halfway there when the two dogs tracked off up into a scruby gully. A few minutes later the bark indicator came up twenty barks per minute out at four hundred meters. Rather than heading up the way the dogs went we followed the ridge up the open ground until we came over above the dogs. We were one hundred meters from the dogs before we could hear them barking down in a step gully. Getting down to them we had to watch our footing as it was quite steep. We stopped just short of the action and got to watch how well the two dogs had this pig under control. Both dogs wear muzzles when hunting as they are both hard dogs and I have witnessed enough times to know that dogs that bite pigs make them angry yet dogs that bail pigs can calm the pigs down. It had taken us fifteen minutes to get the dogs so this pig knew that it could not get away from these two dogs and that as long as the pig stayed backed up the dogs would stand back.
After watching the bail for a few minutes I whistled the dogs out and made a clean shot to the head. Once the pig was bleed and gutted the real work was about to start. As I mentioned the country we were in was real steep and thick scrub. Ron was happy to let me take care of the carry, so with the pig on my back I started climbing. We had gained about fifty meters when there was some crashing above us to our right as the dogs put up another pig. This pig made it back down into the creek to where the dogs bailed it. Because I still had the first pig on my back I said to Ron that I would get this pig up a little further while I still had some energy. As Ron filmed me climbing one section through the scrub the dogs can be heard bailing the second pig in the gully below us.
I made about halfway out of the gully before putting this pig down so that we could head down to the second pig. This pig turned out to be a sow of about 65lb, so I called the dogs off her. However, Bro did not want to let her go and tracked off and bailed her lower down the gully. So we followed on down. Because the road was only a couple of hundred meters below us now I let the two dogs work her down towards the road. Each time calling the dogs off so she could brake down hill before sending the dogs back after her again.
The dogs did manage to bail her right on the road for us but we could not get there quick enough as some places we had to crawl through the scrub and by the time we got to the road she had gone over the side down into the deep gully so I called the dogs back.
We were able to ride the motorbike up the hill to be above our first pig. One more good Grunt uphill and I could drop this 117lb of pork onto the front carrier of the bike.
At home we hung this pig in the chiller to allow it to set while I skinned and boned out the 74lb boar that I caught a couple of days earlier for Ron too take home.
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