Chapter 8

Bill and I were really worried about that encounter with the wild hog. Jake had a suggestion that sounded like it was worth following up: use a 12-gauge shotgun with a single slug. In fact, he had an idea that fit perfectly with our needs. He described a simple modification to a shotgun shell that his great-grandfather had used back in the days of the 1930s Great Depression.

This was called a "cut shotgun shell." All it took was a knife to cut a ring around the shell, leaving just enough of the shell casing to make it hold together until the shell was fired. The cut was made at about the middle of the wadding separating the shot from the powder. When the shell was fired, the front end was torn loose at the cut and all of the pellets were trapped inside the moving part of the shell. Thus, it was pretty much equivalent to a single slug striking the target. Jake's great-grandfather had kept his family fed during the Great Depression on deer, wild hogs, and the occasional bear.

Jake was a reliable source as far as we were concerned, so Bill and I gave full credence to his suggestion. All we needed to do was to pick up some shells loaded with birdshot, as this was the recommended load to use for the cut shotgun shell. Bill carried an autoloading shotgun with the standard buckshot, and I carried a double barrel shotgun loaded with cut shotgun shells. Normally, Bill would shoot game that was appropriate for his buckshot, and I would back him up when we needed the extra killing power of the slugs. Of course, we still carried our 9 mm automatics as extra backup.

We tested Jake's suggestion of the cut shotgun shells on a couple of small trees. My God, he was right about the effect of the pseudo-single slug. I found that I could cut a small tree in half at up to 25 yards, and I did not expect to need any more range than that. The next morning, Bill and I went hunting with our new ammunition. We carried spare ammunition in a belt pouch: Bill had 10 extra buckshot shells and I had six extra cut shotgun shells. Neither one of us expected to fire that many shells, but we were working on the principle of better safe than sorry.

We loaded our bicycles in the back of our pickup and drove about five miles to where we expected to find a number of wild hogs. We reached our hunting site just as the sun was coming up. We could hear the wild hogs rooting for breakfast within a few steps of where we had parked the truck. This was an area where most of the brush was low to the ground so that we should be able to see the hogs as they hunted their breakfast.

We were probably luckier than we deserved, but we spotted a boar of the size we wanted very shortly after we approached where the hogs were at work. I lined up my double barrel shotgun on the boar and fired one round. Oh, Man, the result was exactly what we had hoped for: the boar was mortally wounded and fell over after it had taken only a couple of steps. Of course, the rest of the hogs cleared the area in a burst of speed.

We tied the boar's hind legs together and dragged it toward our pick up. Dammit, that animal was heavy! As soon as we got close enough, we hooked up the winch and used that to pull the carcass up onto the truck bed. That kill had been so easy that we let our success go to our heads. There was another similar area about a quarter-mile down the road, so we drove there to see if we could find any more hogs before returning home.

This time, the hogs were rooting no more than 100 feet from where we parked the truck. There were three boars and at least six sows with piglets working the area. That was just too damned many for us to take a chance, so, without setting foot on the ground, we climbed into the truck bed and looked for suitable targets. We felt so safe up here that we decided that Bill would go after some piglets while I went after another boar.

We only had to wait a few minutes for suitable targets to show themselves. We decided that Bill should shoot first. He quickly dispatched three piglets with buckshot from his autoloading shotgun. The other wild hogs reacted to the loud noise of his gunshots, but did not seem to understand what kind of danger they were in. The sows ran toward the downed piglets, and the boars looked around to see where the danger was coming from.

I selected a boar of medium-size and fired one round into his body just behind a foreleg. The boar let out a scream of pain and surprise and fell over where he stood. The other two boars were befuddled and simply stood where they were. That was too good an opportunity to pass up, so I fired my other round into the closest boar. That boar died as quickly as had the first one that I had shot, and we now had a gracious plenty of meat from this one hunting trip.

As prudence dictated, Bill and I reloaded our shotguns before we did anything else. The dead animals were also so close to the truck that we could winch them aboard with a minimum amount of work. I stood guard while Bill collected the three piglets that he had shot. He tossed them up onto the truck bed and took the end of the winch cable to fastened to the nearest of the two dead boars.

I stood on the truck bed with my shotgun and kept a careful watch while Bill was working. Nothing untoward happened, and we had no trouble winching the two dead boars into the truck. As you may guess, we were very cocky and exuberant as we headed back home.

We were greeted as conquering heroes when we showed up with our game. Our wives made a big deal over us, and that was duly appreciated. The other people in our group also carried on about our success, and we tried to steer some of the praise toward Jake whose idea it had been to use the modified shotgun shells. Jake tried to avoid taking a lot of praise, but Bill and I would not let him escape.

We had not field dressed our pray before returning to camp, so that was the first item of business as we unloaded the pickup. Bill and I drove to a place close to a stream where we could get the water we needed to wash the blood from the truck bed. We didn't rush the job, so the butchering was well underway by the time we got back from cleaning the truck.

The first target of the butchers was the smallest of the boars. As soon as he was ready, and that didn't take very long considering the number of people working on the job, the carcass was mounted on a spit and the roasting was started. Eli and Suzy were assigned the job of keeping the spit turning and making sure that there were plenty of coals for the cooking.

Meanwhile, the rest of us, including Bill and me, worked on getting the other carcasses ready for smoking in our smokehouse. Some of the meat was simply jerked, but most of it was retained to serve as roasts and hams and such. Just that one hunting venture had provided us enough hog meat to carry us a month or more. The fish we were able to catch from the river, along with the hogs, provided us with an ample supply of protein. We would have to start farming next year, but we could live for now on the canned goods that we salvaged from various stores.

Frankly, we were living about as easy a life as one could find under those circumstances; however, we knew that this good life could not continue forever. For one thing, we would eventually run out of shotgun shells and would have to find other ways to hunt the wild hogs. That was not a happy prospect, but we hoped to push the inevitable several years away. At least, Jake knew how to reload shotgun shells as long as we could provide him with the raw materials. Finding the reloading supplies was pushed to very near the top of our resupply agenda. Fortunately, that was a common avocation in this area, and it was fairly easy to find what we needed.

Currently, we were still living aboard our houseboats, but the impending birth of Naomi Wainwright's child pushed us toward coming to a decision about how we were going to live. We really thought we would be the most comfortable if we continued to live on the houseboats; however, we would need more houseboats as our population increased. With that in mind, we decided to make up a small search expedition to look farther south along the river to see if we could come up with additional houseboats of the type that would serve our needs.

We now had 12 adults in our group, so we could afford to split up for the search. We discussed every possibility we could think of and decided to send six couples to do the searching and leave six behind to maintain our current little community. We agreed that Hank, Ruth, John, and Vivian would join Sue and me to search for additional boats. Bill had to hang around the camp to look after Naomi, since he was the nearest thing to a doctor that we had. Jake and Lucy had their kids to look after, June stayed with Bill, and Jess stayed with his pregnant wife. We all admitted that that was not a perfect division of labor, but we would just have to live with it.