C-Brats friends: I write a monthly column (seldom seen) and this month I penned a true story from the past -- it is somewhat boat related I suppose, as there is water involved in it . . .
A Christmas Hawg Hunt To Remember
by Matt Mattson
Yes, I've been hog hunting before.
By 1975 I'd killed so many deer with a rifle I figured I needed a bigger challenge and decided I'd get one of the new muzzleloaders then coming into fad and take it out hog hunting or hawg-huntin as it's better known down here. I presently found myself at the doorstep of "Peterson's Gun Shop" in Mt. Dora, Florida, talking to Leighton Baker, then in his 80's.
Leighton Baker owned the gunshop and had been trained by Axel Peterson in Colorado. Axel Peterson was one of the original Rocky Mountain barrel makers and knew Jim Bridger (mountain-man Ft. Bridger on your aerial chart) personally. Leighton Baker trained under Axel Peterson, bought his shop, and eventually moved it to Mt. Dora, where many of the old man's Creedmore long-range express black-powder masterpieces are still on display. Now in his 80's, Leighton must have gone back to his earlier years in his mind, because he walled off a whole section of the shop and devoted it exclusively to black-powder rifles and called that part of the shop, The Swampfire Shop.
Leighton sized up my young frame and decided what I needed was an exact copy of a Bridger rifle, called a Sante Fe Hawken, in .52 caliber. .52 was actually the correct caliber of the Hawken guns he explained, though the Italians then making them used .54 for ease of machining. But mine was a certified correct .52 with a barrel turned by Green Mountain. By the end of the day, I had a bona-fide rifle, buckskins, pouch, genuine simulated plastic cow-horn powder reservoir, a patch-kit, a cleaning kit, a bullet mould, a bunch of round-balls Leighton himself had made, and a pound of black-powder for practice.
I was in Hawg-heaven.
I went out and practiced with that rifle in the back of an old burned out orange grove and got so I could zip a ball through a 12 oz coke can at 75 yards every time. Satisfied that the normal Hawg range of 50 feet or less should pose no problem, I contacted my best friend and we arranged for a hawg hunt in the wilds of SE Florida at Three Lakes Reserve, S. of Kissimmee, Fl and on the N. shore of Lake Marion.
It was a cold day when we arrived to set up camp in the wilderness camp area (along with about 500 others), and sleep was long coming in the excitement and anticipation of our first ever blackpowder hawg hunt in the morning. Morning came with a start as our fellow hunters rolled out of their tents, quietly got in their gear, silently packed vehicles, stealthily rolled out their 4-wheelers, loaded their muzzloaders -- and discharged them right outside of our tent. We learned later they did this to make sure they would fire because oil residue in the barrel could block the touch-hole and a firing would dry that out.
So we loaded up, dutifully discharged our weapons, and headed out to the happy hunting grounds a couple of miles down a dirt road into the preserve. Parked, we parted ways, with plans to meet at sundown. My friend would head North to one side of the road, cross a fence-line, and walk a mile across a palmetto field to some cypress swamps, and I would do the same heading South on the opposite side of the road, cross a mile-wide palmetto and pine studded waist-high field to a cypress swamp in the distance.
Walking was tough, but I managed to find an old logging road that was still just wide enough to walk down and it meandered back and forth, but still took me in the direction of the cypress swamp. When I got abreast of the swamp, I got off the old road, and eventually got to the edge of the field and the water, surrounding the cypress trees and lilly-pad studded pool, and began working along the edge of swamp and field, always moving further South, away from the busy road where our vehicle was parked.
My feet would sink in the muck and mire, making a swoosh sound as I pulled them from the suction of mother earth, and expending much energy just to walk. There was hawg sign everywhere, with rub marks up to my bellybutton, indicating some 800-1000 pounders must be in the mix nearby. There were pits in the ground where they'd laid, longer than my body. There was torn-up vegetation everywhere, but with my single-shot .52 Santa Fe Hawken that Leighton Baker had assured me was bona-fide certified true and correct, I feared no hawg nor evil of any kind.
Presently, I came to a fence-line, and walked down it, came to a tree, stopped, crouched down beneath it's protective boughs, and rested.
When I awoke, it was nearing dark and I decided I had better get back to the road.
I began walking up the fence-line, and almost had a heart-attack when a flock of fifteen turkeys flushed like a covey of quail, and it was nearing dusk, when I stumbled upon the old logging road intersecting the fence-line. Relieved I wouldn't have to walk back along the marshy edge of the swamp, I started down the old grown-up logging trail to meet up with my friend and hopefully, a hot meal back at camp.
Presently, I came abreast of the same cypress-swamp I'd hunted earlier, but this time, I sensed something amiss. Every step I took, the ground would shake. I looked around, saw nothing, and continued up the trail, but the ground started shaking more and more. I stopped, looked around, and could hear a strange humming noise, kind of like an Indian Hindu chant but a higher pitch: AAAAHHHMMMMM AAAAAAAHHHHMMMM this was going on all around me . . . Then I noticed the bushes were moving -- and then I caught a brief glimpse of a back, about navel high on my body.
GLORY TO GOD ALMIGHTY! I was in a whole nest of Hawgs -- about 30 of them as far as I could figure -- AND THEY WERE ALL MINE! Only one problem -- I had one shot. I looked all around me -- and everywhere I looked there were hawgs, and more hawgs, and hawgs coming, and more hawgs coming, and I knew for a fact what Custer felt like when he surrounded the Indians at the Little Bighorn, and I began to look for a place to make the final stand.
Up ahead, about 30 feet, was a small circular clear area, about 10 yards diameter of clear firing range, and I slipped as breathlessly as I could to it, and took up position directly in the middle, determined to ward off all hawg attacks until help arrived or ammunition ran out (1 shot). I figured that the first living thing to charge out of any portion of the underbrush and into the clear would get a dose of hot lead, and then I would Davy Crocket style start swinging my gun until strength or hawgs ran out -- whichever came first.
I spun all around, the hawgs everywhere around my small circle of life. Spinning and spinning, checking and rechecking for the direction the first attack would come from, I picked up a motion of bushes denoting a hawg coming right at me. With a rush, a black bodied beast was suddenly in the circle with me, and I fired right into that ugly black head, charging headlong towards me, as screams from its mates erupted all around, and bushes where crashing, and gutteral sounds of hell itself couldn't have been louder, as I dropped my rifle and took off running for all I was worth -- the hawgs, hot on my heels right behind! And I ran, and I ran, and I could feel their hot and thirsty for revenge breath on my backside, and I could hear the crashing of the bushes, and I could see my sole salvation was a lone pine tree 50 yards in the distance -- and I ran for all I was worth, leaping the palmettos, crashing the bushes, running and running, and I went straight up that tree and sat breathlessly on a branch some 10 feet above the ground, totally spent.
I truthfully climbed that tree so fast, I don't even remember climbing it, but I was there, because from my perch, I could see my friend running towards me, obviously alarmed by what he had seen. Since he was still in the distance, I took stock of the situation to warn him of impending doom and looked all around for our adversaries . . . They were nowhere to be found. Why, it appears we had all run away from each other, and the crashing noises I had heard, were the crashing sounds of bushes as we all ran in opposite directions. Sheepishly, I climbed from the tree, just as my friend ran up to ask what was happening and I took artistic liberty of informing him that I'd been attacked by wild hogs, had defended myself to the last shot, and had been forced to flee after a vigorous defense of my perimeter against overwhelming odds . . . BUT . . . I had, by golly, killed a hawg!
My friend and I slowly and carefully began out backtrack to the circular clearing, where, almost dead centered, was a hawg, shot through the head. Laying there like he was, he seemed, well, rather small, but, by God it was a hawg and I'd killed it! There was only one problem: my friend didn't think it was big enough to be legal . . . Well, we stood out there and looked at the poor hawg, we argued over whether the poor hawg was legal, we prayed over the poor hawg, and then we burried the poor hawg with full hawg honors as a cold rain began to fall. As I recall it all now, my friend had said he had to be 13 inches . . . and I had looked him over and was sure he would have made that, unitl informed that wasn't length, but to the shoulder he had to measure. No way that poor little fellow was going to be legal, so it was with great sadness and extreme guilt even now, that I left my little hawg friend that taught me so much, in that cold damp field, so very long ago.
We went out to eat that night and had catfish at the restaurant at Lake Marion, but I didn't feel much like eating. The next day, I didn't feel much like hunting either, and spent most of the day hanging around the check station, marveling at some of the enormous hawgs being killed. There were two over 800 pounds, but my mind was on my little friend in the field, when a pickup pulled up with a hawg to check. The tail-gate went down, and there it was . . . a hawg even smaller than the one I'd murdered . . . I carefully asked the warden, so as not to be found out, just what the proper measuring tactics were. Come to find out, the shoulder is about midway in the hawg's back, and they're all practically legal a few days after birth!!!
So my little buddy had been legal after all, and maybe in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't so bad, he'd died nobly in the defense of his hawgdom, and had successfully given his life so all his other hawg buddies might live . . .
So yes, I have been hawg hunting . . . but I'm not going again.
Merry Christmas
Matt Mattson
http://www.treasuresites.com
2004
A Christmas Hawg Hunt To Remember
by Matt Mattson
Yes, I've been hog hunting before.
By 1975 I'd killed so many deer with a rifle I figured I needed a bigger challenge and decided I'd get one of the new muzzleloaders then coming into fad and take it out hog hunting or hawg-huntin as it's better known down here. I presently found myself at the doorstep of "Peterson's Gun Shop" in Mt. Dora, Florida, talking to Leighton Baker, then in his 80's.
Leighton Baker owned the gunshop and had been trained by Axel Peterson in Colorado. Axel Peterson was one of the original Rocky Mountain barrel makers and knew Jim Bridger (mountain-man Ft. Bridger on your aerial chart) personally. Leighton Baker trained under Axel Peterson, bought his shop, and eventually moved it to Mt. Dora, where many of the old man's Creedmore long-range express black-powder masterpieces are still on display. Now in his 80's, Leighton must have gone back to his earlier years in his mind, because he walled off a whole section of the shop and devoted it exclusively to black-powder rifles and called that part of the shop, The Swampfire Shop.
Leighton sized up my young frame and decided what I needed was an exact copy of a Bridger rifle, called a Sante Fe Hawken, in .52 caliber. .52 was actually the correct caliber of the Hawken guns he explained, though the Italians then making them used .54 for ease of machining. But mine was a certified correct .52 with a barrel turned by Green Mountain. By the end of the day, I had a bona-fide rifle, buckskins, pouch, genuine simulated plastic cow-horn powder reservoir, a patch-kit, a cleaning kit, a bullet mould, a bunch of round-balls Leighton himself had made, and a pound of black-powder for practice.
I was in Hawg-heaven.
I went out and practiced with that rifle in the back of an old burned out orange grove and got so I could zip a ball through a 12 oz coke can at 75 yards every time. Satisfied that the normal Hawg range of 50 feet or less should pose no problem, I contacted my best friend and we arranged for a hawg hunt in the wilds of SE Florida at Three Lakes Reserve, S. of Kissimmee, Fl and on the N. shore of Lake Marion.
It was a cold day when we arrived to set up camp in the wilderness camp area (along with about 500 others), and sleep was long coming in the excitement and anticipation of our first ever blackpowder hawg hunt in the morning. Morning came with a start as our fellow hunters rolled out of their tents, quietly got in their gear, silently packed vehicles, stealthily rolled out their 4-wheelers, loaded their muzzloaders -- and discharged them right outside of our tent. We learned later they did this to make sure they would fire because oil residue in the barrel could block the touch-hole and a firing would dry that out.
So we loaded up, dutifully discharged our weapons, and headed out to the happy hunting grounds a couple of miles down a dirt road into the preserve. Parked, we parted ways, with plans to meet at sundown. My friend would head North to one side of the road, cross a fence-line, and walk a mile across a palmetto field to some cypress swamps, and I would do the same heading South on the opposite side of the road, cross a mile-wide palmetto and pine studded waist-high field to a cypress swamp in the distance.
Walking was tough, but I managed to find an old logging road that was still just wide enough to walk down and it meandered back and forth, but still took me in the direction of the cypress swamp. When I got abreast of the swamp, I got off the old road, and eventually got to the edge of the field and the water, surrounding the cypress trees and lilly-pad studded pool, and began working along the edge of swamp and field, always moving further South, away from the busy road where our vehicle was parked.
My feet would sink in the muck and mire, making a swoosh sound as I pulled them from the suction of mother earth, and expending much energy just to walk. There was hawg sign everywhere, with rub marks up to my bellybutton, indicating some 800-1000 pounders must be in the mix nearby. There were pits in the ground where they'd laid, longer than my body. There was torn-up vegetation everywhere, but with my single-shot .52 Santa Fe Hawken that Leighton Baker had assured me was bona-fide certified true and correct, I feared no hawg nor evil of any kind.
Presently, I came to a fence-line, and walked down it, came to a tree, stopped, crouched down beneath it's protective boughs, and rested.
When I awoke, it was nearing dark and I decided I had better get back to the road.
I began walking up the fence-line, and almost had a heart-attack when a flock of fifteen turkeys flushed like a covey of quail, and it was nearing dusk, when I stumbled upon the old logging road intersecting the fence-line. Relieved I wouldn't have to walk back along the marshy edge of the swamp, I started down the old grown-up logging trail to meet up with my friend and hopefully, a hot meal back at camp.
Presently, I came abreast of the same cypress-swamp I'd hunted earlier, but this time, I sensed something amiss. Every step I took, the ground would shake. I looked around, saw nothing, and continued up the trail, but the ground started shaking more and more. I stopped, looked around, and could hear a strange humming noise, kind of like an Indian Hindu chant but a higher pitch: AAAAHHHMMMMM AAAAAAAHHHHMMMM this was going on all around me . . . Then I noticed the bushes were moving -- and then I caught a brief glimpse of a back, about navel high on my body.
GLORY TO GOD ALMIGHTY! I was in a whole nest of Hawgs -- about 30 of them as far as I could figure -- AND THEY WERE ALL MINE! Only one problem -- I had one shot. I looked all around me -- and everywhere I looked there were hawgs, and more hawgs, and hawgs coming, and more hawgs coming, and I knew for a fact what Custer felt like when he surrounded the Indians at the Little Bighorn, and I began to look for a place to make the final stand.
Up ahead, about 30 feet, was a small circular clear area, about 10 yards diameter of clear firing range, and I slipped as breathlessly as I could to it, and took up position directly in the middle, determined to ward off all hawg attacks until help arrived or ammunition ran out (1 shot). I figured that the first living thing to charge out of any portion of the underbrush and into the clear would get a dose of hot lead, and then I would Davy Crocket style start swinging my gun until strength or hawgs ran out -- whichever came first.
I spun all around, the hawgs everywhere around my small circle of life. Spinning and spinning, checking and rechecking for the direction the first attack would come from, I picked up a motion of bushes denoting a hawg coming right at me. With a rush, a black bodied beast was suddenly in the circle with me, and I fired right into that ugly black head, charging headlong towards me, as screams from its mates erupted all around, and bushes where crashing, and gutteral sounds of hell itself couldn't have been louder, as I dropped my rifle and took off running for all I was worth -- the hawgs, hot on my heels right behind! And I ran, and I ran, and I could feel their hot and thirsty for revenge breath on my backside, and I could hear the crashing of the bushes, and I could see my sole salvation was a lone pine tree 50 yards in the distance -- and I ran for all I was worth, leaping the palmettos, crashing the bushes, running and running, and I went straight up that tree and sat breathlessly on a branch some 10 feet above the ground, totally spent.
I truthfully climbed that tree so fast, I don't even remember climbing it, but I was there, because from my perch, I could see my friend running towards me, obviously alarmed by what he had seen. Since he was still in the distance, I took stock of the situation to warn him of impending doom and looked all around for our adversaries . . . They were nowhere to be found. Why, it appears we had all run away from each other, and the crashing noises I had heard, were the crashing sounds of bushes as we all ran in opposite directions. Sheepishly, I climbed from the tree, just as my friend ran up to ask what was happening and I took artistic liberty of informing him that I'd been attacked by wild hogs, had defended myself to the last shot, and had been forced to flee after a vigorous defense of my perimeter against overwhelming odds . . . BUT . . . I had, by golly, killed a hawg!
My friend and I slowly and carefully began out backtrack to the circular clearing, where, almost dead centered, was a hawg, shot through the head. Laying there like he was, he seemed, well, rather small, but, by God it was a hawg and I'd killed it! There was only one problem: my friend didn't think it was big enough to be legal . . . Well, we stood out there and looked at the poor hawg, we argued over whether the poor hawg was legal, we prayed over the poor hawg, and then we burried the poor hawg with full hawg honors as a cold rain began to fall. As I recall it all now, my friend had said he had to be 13 inches . . . and I had looked him over and was sure he would have made that, unitl informed that wasn't length, but to the shoulder he had to measure. No way that poor little fellow was going to be legal, so it was with great sadness and extreme guilt even now, that I left my little hawg friend that taught me so much, in that cold damp field, so very long ago.
We went out to eat that night and had catfish at the restaurant at Lake Marion, but I didn't feel much like eating. The next day, I didn't feel much like hunting either, and spent most of the day hanging around the check station, marveling at some of the enormous hawgs being killed. There were two over 800 pounds, but my mind was on my little friend in the field, when a pickup pulled up with a hawg to check. The tail-gate went down, and there it was . . . a hawg even smaller than the one I'd murdered . . . I carefully asked the warden, so as not to be found out, just what the proper measuring tactics were. Come to find out, the shoulder is about midway in the hawg's back, and they're all practically legal a few days after birth!!!
So my little buddy had been legal after all, and maybe in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't so bad, he'd died nobly in the defense of his hawgdom, and had successfully given his life so all his other hawg buddies might live . . .
So yes, I have been hawg hunting . . . but I'm not going again.
Merry Christmas
Matt Mattson
http://www.treasuresites.com
2004