Chapter 4

Both Bill and Judy Owens seemed like nice people and we formed a friendship as well as a business relationship that night. We exchanged business cards, so we had the necessary contact information. Jo planned to phone Judy as soon as we had a copy of the contract with Laughing Hog Dance Hall. Judy said that she would compose a “Boiler Plate” contract that we could use with other people who wanted our services.

We did our usual hog hunting on the following days until Friday afternoon. We were not sure of what to expect, so we showed up at Laughing Hog Dance Hall about 2:00 PM. I looked up Jed Watson and told him that we were ready to sweep his property for hogs. He wanted to go with us so that he could see how we operated. That was fine with us because it let us set the exact limits on the area we had to cover.

I planned to swing a bit outside of Jed’s property line if it was justified by the presence of wild hogs, but I didn’t mention that to Jed right then. Fortunately, we had some extra ear protection along, so Jed would not be bothered too much by the noise of our shotguns. Jed rode in the back seat because I had been depending on Jo to help me find hogs, and I was afraid that would be messed up if he sat where Jo usually did.

The dance hall was on a little rise in the ground—I hesitate to call it a hill. Most of the terrain was pretty flat except for a few hills and valleys here and there. We could easily see that there were no hogs in front of the dance hall, so we headed toward the rear of the building.

Back there was an old pecan orchard, and that was a magnet for hogs this time of the year. The trees were planted in a grid pattern about 40 feet apart. That meant that there was plenty of room for our truck between the trees, yet the leaves made a thick canopy that kept down much in the way of undergrowth. We should see any hogs if they had shown up yet.

Jo sang out just before we got to the trees. “John, look over to your left. I can see at least three hogs over there, and one of them might be a boar, judging from its size.”

I made a sharp left turn to make it easy for Jo to line up on the hogs. We all put on our ear protection, and Jo lowered her window. There turned out to be five hogs rooting under a couple of the trees. I opened my window, too, and picked up my shotgun just in case any of the hogs ran to my side of the truck.

As soon as I was ready, Jo started shooting. I can’t quite say why it was, but this bunch of hogs scattered by the time she had fired her third shot. She had killed two and badly wounded one, but not so much that it couldn’t run. Suddenly, I had three hogs on my side of the truck. I went after the two unwounded hogs and managed to knock them down with only one shot for each, so I had time to kill that last wounded hog as well.

That wounded one was the boar, and that might well have been the reason Jo’s shot had not killed him. Her shot had hit him in the side, but he was just too tough to give in to her load of buckshot. However, my shot was the final blow, and down he went right away. I suspect that at least one of my buckshot had hit him in the heart.

I reloaded my shotgun and put it back in the rack. Jo also reloaded, but kept her shotgun handy in case another hog showed up. It was just a case of which was more convenient, but I drove to a place where it would be easy to pick up the three carcasses. We all piled out of the truck and climbed into the bed. Jo stood guard with her shotgun while Jed and I put down the ramp.

That sure was easier to do with two men to work on it. Also, I had taken the truck to a friend of mine on Wednesday, and he added an extension cable to the winch control box so that I could control it while standing on the ground at the ramp. I sent Jed back into the truck bed while I went to retrieve the carcasses. That was done in only a few minutes with the two sows, but that boar turned out to be a real pain in the ass to get into the truck. He was almost too heavy for the winch.

We picked up the other two carcasses and resumed our hunt with Jed in the back seat. That was all of the hogs we could find in the pecan grove, but we did spot two more in a grassy field. Those two were taken care of, and they were the last we found on Jed’s property. We dropped him off back at the dance hall and picked up a check for $150 and the contract. Jed also wanted a picture of the dead hogs that he could stick up over the bar. We posed for him and drove off to sell our hogs.

We were starting to saturate our market for dead hogs, so we had to go all the way to Ashford to sell the last two. This was a profitable excursion, and we were quite happy with our luck. Jed was happy, too, and I could see that he was expecting us to work ourselves out of a job after a couple of months. I didn’t tell him that he was not going to be so lucky.

We drove by Judy’s home-office and dropped off the contract for her to look at. Damn, that thing was full of legalese that had to be intended to confuse us. We asked her to get rid of that shit when she wrote up our version of the contract. Judy acted as if she were disappointed when we said that, then she laughed and said, “I’ll to the best I can, but I hope you realize how much fun you are taking out of the whole thing when I have to write it so that a civilian can understand it.” She laughed, but Jo and I didn’t. She said that she would have her recommendation on the proposed contract in a couple of days. We didn’t worry since Jed was honoring his handshake agreement.

That suggested an idea to me. When we got home, Jo added the line: “Freelance & Contract Work” to our business cards. We ran off another dozen cards that I put into my billfold. Jo also put some in her purse. That suggested that she planned to travel outside the house by herself, and that was blessed news for me. I didn’t say anything, but I was happy for her.

We spent the next two weeks freelance hunting, except for the work under the contract for Laughing Hog Dance Hall. The next Friday, we picked up five more hogs out there, and Jed was very happy. He had started advertising about us going after the hogs around his place, and he said that he could already see a pickup in business. By the way, Judy approved the contract and explained what all of those fancy words meant, so we signed it and had our first regular customer.

Word-of-mouth advertising was working for us. Jed was one of those people who could not keep his mouth shut over good news. He mentioned to a few of his buddies about what we were doing for him, so we got a few telephone calls from other people who already had a hog problem or were anticipating one.

Several of the job offers looked good, so we talked to Judy about what we should do to protect ourselves in case of an accident. She suggested that we form a Limited Liability Corporation. Judy wrote up the paperwork, and we became “Higgins Hog Hunters, LLC.” Jo decided that we should go all the way and had Higgins Hog Hunters, LLC painted on the doors of our truck in gold-colored paint. Man, did we look sexy in that truck! Of course, this meant another change to our business card. This time, I threw the old cards away, and just used the new version.

A couple of days after the corporation papers came through, we talked to two more possible contract clients. One of them was a large sawmill that was already having trouble with wild hogs. No humans had been harmed yet, but they had lost two of their watchdogs to the tusks of boars. We were going to have to search among numerous piles of sawdust and stacks of planks. This was going to be somewhat more complicated than our sweep at Laughing Hog Dance Hall, so we reached an agreement to sweep the place on Thursday afternoons at $250 per sweep, plus whatever hogs were killed.

The other one was Allgood Catfish Farm. They did raise catfish commercially, but they also ran a restaurant that drew a large crowd on Friday night—the traditional fish night, though most people had no idea of the reason for the tradition. Anyway, we agreed to sweep their facility on Friday morning for $250 per sweep, again plus whatever hogs were killed.