Patched Balls & Pork Chops

 

The old adage, “When one door closes another one opens,” may be overused, but one recently closed door opened another door to a very unexpected black powder adventure.

A seed had been planted in a primal portion of my brain by, of all things, a young oboist, on a flight to Tennessee. She sat next to me, pouring over music for oboes. I love good music but didn’t know an oboe from a piccolo. Thus, began a conversation where she shared her passion for playing in a symphony orchestra. I, in turn, shared with her my passion for shooting things. Rather than asking one of the flight attendants for another seat, this genteel musician looked at me thoughtfully and confessed she secretly dreamt of slaying a wild pig with a bow and arrow! She’d been told there were wild boars in Eastern Tennessee. Then and there her secret dream blew a seed of possibility into my fertile imagination.

The closed door came in the form of an email from the Montana Department of Fish and Wildlife. My brother-in-law Steve and I had not been drawn for 2023 antelope permits. I’m retired and he’d already taken the time off, so what to do? Steve lives outside Nashville, and when I mentioned Tennessee hogs he was on the idea like “a beard on Bigfoot”! If I’d come out in November, he’d have it arranged.

So it was that I stepped through the second door into the airport in Nashville on Halloween. I had a heart full of hopes and a rolling Igloo cooler full of gear. The rest of my gear and my rifle I’d shipped ahead to pare down what I’d have to drag through airports.

My dream of hairy, toothy pork chops revolved around my Thompson Center .54 Hawken rifle. I’d build it from a kit back in the 80’s but killed precious little with it over the years. None of my hunting buddies, nor my favorite hunting partner (my dad) were black powder guys. The big .54 had knocked the stuffing out of one muley buck and one doe.

Near-sightedness made the original sights unsatisfactory from the start. Thankfully, Lyman made a globe front sight and rear peep that worked wonders for me. I found 90 grains of black powder, a .015 patch, and a Hornady round ball shot “minute of deer” groups out to 100 yards. I was content. Eventually, black powder became hard to track down in my town, so I bought a pound of Pyrodex RS and went back to the range. I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy the old, visceral black powder experience with Pyrodex, but I needn’t have worried. My 90-grain black powder measure gave me 85-grain loads of Pyrodex when weighed. These proved every bit as accurate and impressive as my black powder loads.

I found I couldn’t legally ship black powder, Pyrodex, or percussion caps to my hunting destination. At least not without going through a HAZMAT permit holder and paying a HAZMAT fee on top of the shipping fee. You can’t put “hazardous materials” in checked baggage on any airline either. So, you may need to have a plan to acquire these on the other end of your flight.

On November 4th, Steve and I arrived at the hunting lodge on the Cumberland Plateau. All the online reviews were near perfect, but when no one was there to check us in, we began to have our doubts. I won’t share the lodge’s name but we were to meet a cast of characters you could not have made up. From Night One – and on – Steve did not sleep alone. On the second day, he sheepishly asked if I’d been troubled by mosquitos or ticks, I hadn’t. Then he asked me what I’d thought of the red welts he had around his belt line. He hoisted his shirt to show a group of angry polka dots the size of M & M’s! I told him I thought they were bedbug bites. It took weeks for the sores to heal.

Our very young guide was near-sighted, had broken glasses, and didn’t carry binoculars. Fortunately, for us, wild hogs are exactly the same, except for the broken glasses part. The first morning was cold, damp, and breezy. There was a weak sun trying to cut the clouds. Steve and I spotted an out of place object on a south-facing slope and I pounded on the guide’s shoulder to stop the quad we were riding. I pointed out the object and handed him my binoculars. He agreed the object looked like a pig’s ear flapping in the sun and gave me the thumbs up. Immediately, I primed my .54 and began stalking this “ear”.

As I crept forward, we really didn’t know what I was getting closer to. I could just make out two black masses next to each other and imagined two boars laying end to end. The lone ear got bigger and bigger. At about 15 yards I was as close as I cared to be, but still didn’t have a clear shot because of the curve of the hill and deep grass. So, I knelt there with the hammer back and my blood pounding. Then, the two masses began to rise just a little and I realized they were both ends of one giant hog! He was facing away from me and when I saw what I believed to be the center of his neck, I shot. I was totally aghast to see him jump up and trot downhill shaking his head. He was heading towards the oak forest 30 yards away. Steve hollered he could shoot as the pig ran by him, and I yelled, “DO IT!” His shot produced a loud squeal just before the pig was swallowed by forest shadows.

Once I got the Hawken reloaded, we crept into the woods like a pair of newly appointed deputies entering a Wild West saloon on the bad end of town. We stood quietly surveying the forest floor and letting our eyes adjust to the dark. After a few moments I saw a long, black face looking at us from under a wind-toppled tree about 20 feet downhill. I have white nail polish on the rim of the globe front sight, which stood out boldly against his broad, black forehead. This shot left the boar very dead and me with a graphic European mount as a trophy. On close examination, my first shot went through the boar’s neck above the spine. Steve’s shot went low and broke a front leg.

Our young guide appeared awestruck and confused at the size of the boar. We were all confused to see it had hooves like a horse instead of cloven hooves like members of the porcine tribe are supposed to have. The lodge’s scales were broken but the great-great-grandfather, the great-grandfather, and the grandfather all solemnly agreed the boar weighed well over 400 pounds. They looked at the tusks and said it was at least 15 years old, judging by the comparison of their thickness to the granddad’s stout thumbs. Before I could even point out the hooves, granddad proclaimed, “You’ve shot yourself a Mule Foot!” He said it was very uncommon but not unknown for a wild hog to grow a single solid hoof on each foot.

On our second full day of hunting, Steve earned the moniker of “El Cinco” by dispatching a boar with five shots from his 30-30! Let us remember, the old “Thurdy-Thurdy” is the smokeless sibling to the 32-40 and 38-55, black powder cartridges chambered in the Model 1894 Winchester rifle. So, I think “El Cinco”, his boar, and his rifle merit a place in this black powder adventure story.

Both our hogs were as fat as, well, . . . hogs! The white acorns had been on the ground for several weeks. My boar had two inches of butter yellow fat all over its body and three inches over his shoulders and neck. The meat has proven delicious beyond my highest hopes. I wish you could try some of the breakfast sausage!

Are patched round balls from a .54 enough to cleanly kill a big wild hog? Is a 30-30 adequate for the job? Yes, and yes. Why eight shots to down two pigs then? Pure and simple, poor bullet placement. I had a 15-yard-wide case of “Boar Fever”, which is much more pleasant than Swine Flu but it did bugger up my judgment. I didn’t understand that hidden in the tall grass was a hog with a “neck” as broad as my chest. I didn’t place my shot well. My second shot shattered the back half of the boar’s skull and continued on to pulverize the vertebrae at the base of the skull.

Steve tried hard to do all the right stuff on his pig hunt, but he had a new red-dot sight on his rifle and very little to no practice taking off-hand shots. His hog was in and out of shadowy laurels and would only stop for a few seconds. His first shot was a lethal one, but he didn’t know that, so he wisely kept shooting until the boar went down.

If there’s a moral here, there’s two: “Stuff” happens when hunting, especially unfamiliar game in unfamiliar settings. The other is you’re inviting “stuff” to happen when you’re unversed with your equipment. Experience matters. El Cinco would agree. We also agree these pork chops have been heavenly! And, on the topic of heavenly things, I encourage you to listen to “Gabriel’s Oboe” today. Now, pick up your gun, and go have yourself an adventure!