I’ve Been Charged by Bears and Moose. Wild Hogs Are Way More Dangerous

This story, “Hawgs Ain’t All Gravy,” appeared in the January 1977 issue of Outdoor Life.

In more than half a century of big-game hunting during which I have stalked, photographed, and either passed up or taken several hundred animals, I’ve had any number of them run toward me as though they intended to do me in. I thought at the time, and later was certain, that almost all of those animals had no lethal intentions. They had only one thing in mind: they were trying to get away. Not knowing my exact whereabouts, they simply ran in my direction.

So far as I know, I’ve been charged by only five animals. One was a wounded Kodiak bear that mistook me as the source of his affliction and came at me from about 75 feet away. Another was a big black bear that came for me. Not wishing to harm her or her two cubs, I retreated and left her in charge of the arena. We ap­praised one another from a dis­tance and, apparently satisfied that she had the situation in hand, the sow herded her young ones and shuffled off.

Then there was a moose I en­countered in Wyoming’s Thorofare during the rutting season. I stepped off my horse to photo­graph a bull that stood at the edge of a swamp. He seemed placid enough, but suddenly he wheeled and made for me. Neither my horse nor I had any idea whether he had in mind to breed or to scalp us and, not par­ticularly wishing to learn, we got out of there as though our touch­ holes had been turpentined. I hit the saddle with a running dive that would have done credit to a movie cowboy.

My other experiences were with wild boars. Over the years, my contacts with big game have led me to believe that the only tribe that has no sense of fear is the one to which pigs belong. This includes the European wild boar, introduced into our Eastern mountains and Southern coastal islands in the early part of the century, and feral hogs that have escaped civilization and made it on their own in the swamps and mountains. They have noses and ears as sensitive as deer. Most of the time, when a lone hunter ap­proaches, they are wise enough to vanish into the brush or to run before a dog pack. But, cornered or in sudden confrontation, they are most likely to charge or put on a hair-raising demonstration of their ferocity.

Though I’ve been tempted several times to do so, I have never been forced to squirrel up a tree to escape the mean inten­tions of a heavy-tusked boar. But several of my hunting partners, with more sense than I, have taken to the timber.

I was hunting with a fellow on the rim of the Great Smoky Mountains. He weighed about 300 pounds, though he swore it was only 290 and that the spare tire around his middle was all muscle.

He’d never seen a wild boar in the woods, and I was anxious for him to put a tusked trophy on the wall of his den. From the sounds, our pack had a running fight going on in the dense laurel, and from the yam­mering, snarling, and snapping, the chase appeared to be coming our way. We stood in a clearing but close enough to the thicket so that if the conflict spilled out of the laurel someone would be able to get off a quick shot if necessary.

I glanced at my companion. He was as tense as a Charlie Russell statue, only statues don’t have sweat shining on their foreheads. The boar broke out of the thicket a couple of dozen yards away, seemed to pause a second, then made a beeline for the man-statue. I couldn’t tell whether or not the pig had his sights set on my part­ner, and the guy didn’t wait to find out. He made a half gesture to put his rifle to his shoulder, then dropped it on the ground and shin­nied up the nearest tree. The limb­ less trunk wasn’t much larger than a flagpole but, belly and all, he went up it high enough to get his feet above the hog and dogs that steamed under him.

When the pack and its quarry had gone into the laurel on the other side of the clearing, the guy dropped to the ground. His face wore an expression that charitably might be described as chagrin. As he leaned over to pick up his gun, he mumbled, “The dogs and boar were so bunched I was afraid to shoot.”

Lea Lawrence, long an outdoor partner of mine, told me that he was once treed by a boar. Lea, an east Tennessean, has been around wild hogs all of his life. He agrees with me that though pigs have a strong instinct for survival, not many will back off from threaten­ing situations.

“I was standing with my back to the edge of a cliff when the race came around the mountain,” he recalled. “The trail I watched was heavily used, and I figured the animal had to come my way. It did. The boar exploded out of the brush about 40 feet away, saw me, and swerved slightly to come directly toward me. He was as mean looking a pig as ever I did see.

“I threw up my rifle, shot, and rolled him over but hardly slowed him down. Before I could jack in another shell, he was boiling to­ward me again, and he was so close that even if I’d killed him his momentum would have taken us both over the precipice. I grabbed timber, boy, and was glad to get it. The limb was low enough to reach, and I threw my legs over it like an acrobat on a circus bar. The boar went under me and swung back to the trail, the hounds close behind. We followed and finished him off farther around the moun­tain. My first shot had hit him so hard that eventually he would have died, but it didn’t slow him up.”

For  a  while  my  friend,  Doc Hines, of Cleveland, Tennessee, raised wild boars. His stock came from the full-blooded Rooshians, as the east Tennessee mountain men call them. They were brought over from central Europe years ago and turned loose in the Snow­bird Mountains.

“There wasn’t any taming them,” Doc said. “Even those born and raised behind heavy wire were just as short-tempered as the wild stock we started with.”

Doc Hines turned out some of the pigs on lands hunted by his hometown Boar, Bear and Deer Club, and he sold some to other landowners for stocking purposes. “I kept one old tusker for sev­eral years,” Doc told me. “He was as cantankerous as all get out. The fellow I finally sold him to sent a couple of men with a truck and heavy crate to pick him up. We walked out to the pen, which covered a couple of acres.”

One of the truckers turned to Doc and asked, “How you gonna get him in the crate?”

“He’s yours,” Doc said. “How are you gonna get him in the crate?”

The fellow grinned. “Don’t guess it’ll be too hard to do,” he said. “I punched cows for a long time in Wyoming  and I’m good with a rope.”

He walked inside the fence, latched the gate behind him, and shook out a loop. As he approach­ed, the boar turned away but the cowboy was close enough to flip his loop over its head. The pig lunged forward until it reached the end of the rope, swung around, and came straight for the man. The cowboy dropped his end of the rope and vaulted over the wire fence like he’d started from the top side of a pogo stick.

“We finally had to call in a man with a dart gun and tranquilize that critter before we could drag him out of there and into the crate,” Doc said.

I almost got into a close-quarters squabble with the largest boar that ever eye-balled me from much too close. We were in the rough inter­ior of Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas.

The story was that many years ago, Great Abaco had been one of the hideouts of pirates. To provide themselves with fresh meat, they brought a load of swine from Africa and released them on the island. After generations spent in an en­vironment that runs heavy to lime­stone, the animals became big­ boned, heavy-tusked, and carried a tremendous amount of meat.

Morris Thompson of Green Tur­tle Cay made arrangements for us to hunt with an islander named Gus Adderly. Most of the men in that part of the world derived their livelihoods from the sea. Gus was a woodsman and a hunter, and one of the finest physical specimens I’ve ever seen. He used small dogs, but they knew their business. Dur­ing the morning they ran down and bayed a couple of shoats that had plenty of fight in them, but our guide and his son Bill were able to capture them alive.

“Ve put them in hog pen and ven dey grow up,” Gus said. “Dey make fine piece of meat dat bring good price.”

The dogs skirted a small marsh and hit a trail that caused Gus to raise his brows.

“De dogs tell me it’s a big one,” he said. That was verified minutes later when we found the tracks. The race had gone into a rough part of the is­land. Trees and shrubs were sewed together with a network of vines, and the ground under them was strewn with blocks of lime­ stone covered with moss. Gus melted into this, leaving me to fol­low the sound of the dogs.

The race seemed to be getting farther away. So, holding my 4×5 Speed Graphic camera in one hand, I lunged in the direction Gus had taken. Somewhere up ahead Gus yelled, and I angled toward the sound of his voice. When I arrived on the scene I saw a large boar half on his hindquarters in a dense thicket, with dogs darting in, out, and around him. Gus stood off to one side, as though to guard against the boar’s escape.

I waited until my pulse throttled down to about 150 beats a minute, then looked under the copse. There was no way to get a picture of the fracas except to crawl in closer. I told the guide what I planned to do. He nodded but said, “Don’t get too close in dere.”

I eased my way into the tangle. It was so dark that I reached back to my coat pocket for a flash bulb and snapped it into the holder. Until then the boar had paid me no attention. When I clicked that bulb into place, however, he whirl­ed on a dime, broke through the ring of dogs, and made straight for me.

You’ll never see anything or anybody crawdad out of anyplace as fast as I did out of that thicket. I couldn’t have made it on my own. It was Gus who saved me from be­ing hurt or killed. He moved almost the same instant the boar did. The critter was only inches away from me when the guide slashed down with his machete. It cut through stems and vines, hit the boar on its skull, and knocked him down. Gus then fell on the hog, penning it down. The boar made a savage thrust with its tushes, missing Gus’s face by a fraction.

When Gus fell on the boar, he had dropped his machete. It lay just beyond his reach. While the tusker was slashing its ivories back and forth, Gus bent over and picked up a pine knot on a stout limb.

“Here. I show you,” he said.

I’ve never seen a more primitive, savage battle. It lasted only a min­ ute or two. Then the boar lay still, rolling its eyes. Gus pulled a piece of heavy twine from his pocket and tied the boar’s snout and bound its feet. When he lifted it to his shoulders for the long trek back through the jungle to his fattening pen, I got the impression that the animal was still spoiling for a fight. I may have only suspected it before, but I became sure that pigs have no sense of fear when I met a boar at Clark Range out on the Cumberland Plateau in central Tennessee. A few thousand acres of this rugged upland had been converted into a shooting preserve that featured wild boars, which were original stock introduced in east Tennessee and the Georgia coast.

I went to Clark Range just to check on a story, and I had no intention of shooting a boar or any­ thing else. But in hunting season I usually haul around a gun or two.

I explained to Francis Satter­ field, the preserve owner, why I was there.

“Why don’t you hunt,” he said. “Our guides have a fellow in tow and you would complete the party. We won’t tell the guides who you are or why you are here. That way you’ll get a better idea of how we do things.”

I met the guides — Horace Vaug­han, Burton Hargis, and Ethridge Phillips. One of them said, “We’ve been after a big Rooshian for sev­eral weeks. When we push him close he loses himself in a laurel thicket. So far we haven’t got a shot. We’ll try him today, if you like.”

“Sounds like a winner,” I said.

So I loaded my Kennon .308 and we turned the dogs loose where a set of sizable tracks crossed the woods road half a mile below the lodge. They cold-trailed for a while, but far down in the hollow they jumped a hog. It made for a ridge beyond us and we angled to cut off the race. The pig got there first and went on over the ridge.

From the sounds, our guides could tell that the chase went along the rim of a limestone canyon, and they predicted that it would turn back into a hollow beyond the ridge. We made for it, and this time we were on schedule. The boar was in a thicket.

When we were 100 yards off, my partner threw up his rifle for a shot. A guide was close enough to grab his arm.

“The action is so fast, there’s too much chance of hitting a dog,” he said.

Slashing right and left, the pig broke through the dogs and went up the hollow with the pack behind it. My companion made a running shot and the animal crumpled in its tracks.

We gutted it, hung it on a tree limb where it could be picked up later, and Burton Hargis glanced at me.

“We’ll try to rout out that big boy for you,” he said.

“I appreciate that,” I said, “but I don’t really want to kill one of your boars.”

“What’d you come up here for?” Horace asked.

“I was interested in how you hunt these pigs.”

“We’ve got to go back to the lodge anyhow and we may as well hunt on the way,” he said. “We’ll feel mighty let down if you don’t kill a boar.”

They seemed to be disappointed, so I changed my tune. “If we see a big tusker, I’ll try to do him in,” I said.

They went back to their job, and almost immediately the pack jump­ed another hog. The race went around the side of the hill and stopped in a clump of hemlock. We followed to a point where we could see the pig.

“That one is too small,” I said.

Ethridge shrugged and, with the other guides, went in to get the dogs.

The next boar we jumped was larger, but I found another reason for not wanting to shoot it.

“I’m really looking for one with big tusks,” I said.

We started in the direction of the lodge and had gone about half a mile when the pack opened up on the ridge beyond us.

“No race there,” Horace said. “Sounds like they already have him bayed. We’d better go over and take a look.”

We found the dogs ringed around the heavy top of a wind­ thrown oak. Through the barren branches we could see the boar lying down, and the hounds were keeping a respectful distance.

“Now that’s a pretty good one,” Burton said.

He and I were standing about 50 or 60 feet away from the treetop. I was racking my brain for an ex­cuse not to eliminate one of Fran­cis Satterfield’s boars when the hog stood up. He looked much larger than he had when lying down.

“That’s the one you want,” Bur­ton said. “He’s a rusty Rooshian and he’s got hisself some damn good tusks.”

I hesitated, my .308 in the crook of my arm. The boar made up my mind for me. He stepped out of the treetop and stood facing us. With startling suddenness he low­ered his head and made straight for Burton and me. I had no choice. I threw up my rifle.

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When I pulled the trigger, the animal had left the ground with its head turned slightly sideways and its tusks exposed. I snap shot for its head, but my 180-grain Nosier went over its skull and broke its back. Burton and I jumped to one side and the boar fell dead where we had been standing. The guide looked at me and grinned.

“Sure glad you made up your mind you’d like to have this one,” he said.