Well, actually it ended up being two pigs!
I went down to the land yesterday to do some work and brought my gun just in case. My feeder was out of corn and one camera had the memory card full and the other's battery was dead so I didn't refill the corn right away. There weren't many tracks and it had rained earlier in the week so it didn't look very promising.
It was about 8:30 so I figured I might as well stick around until dark before going home and see if I could call in a coyote or something. I set up my electronic caller and walked up to the top of the hill and waited. After less than 5 minutes I saw something moving in the mesquites about 200 yards away and it turned out to be a group of about 8 or 9 wild pigs. They didn't see me and the wind was in my favor so I waited until they went over a slight ridge and went out after them trying to head them off. They ended up going into a small field and eating on some wheat.
I got about 50 yards away from them and waited until one of the larger ones was turned broadside and shot it in the head. The group moved off to the left and stopped and still hadn't seen me so I shot another one. Then they saw me and started running off and I shot again and I'm not sure if I hit one or not, but I only found 2. It was a good thing because the 2 that I found had more meat than I could fit into the cooler anyway.
It took me a little over an hour to quarter them up and take the backstraps out and get them in the cooler using the headlights of my car. I was actually pretty happy that it only took that long. (It took 1 hour and 11 minutes according to my camera times). I skinned and quartered them laying on the ground and didn't gut them. About the only good meat that I left was the ribs and the tenderloin, but I was tired and ready to get out of there and already had my cooler completely overflowing with meat. I stopped by a convienience store and bought a cheap styrofoam cooler and some more ice and got everything pretty well iced down at right out 2 hours after I pulled the trigger.
Here is a picture of the pigs:
If it helps the perspective any that's a 7mm Rem Mag with a 26" barrel and a total length of right around 4' long. They don't look very big, but I would conservatively guess the smaller one to be around 50 lbs and the larger one around 150 lbs or so. That's based on dragging the smaller one about 30 yards and the fact that larger one was very difficult to move around to skin and quarter. Also we just took our 1 1/2 year old rottweiler to the vet and she weighed in at 98 lbs and the larger pig was MUCH heavier than that.
We cooked one of the backstraps on the grill for supper tonight and it tasted really good, but it was a little tough. We didn't marinate it or anything so hopefully with a little work it will get a little more tender. I'm keeping the meat in the two coolers in salty ice water for a few days to help tenderize it.
Oh well, I was pretty excited!
Got my first pig!!
