This past Saturday, Tim Albee and I were invited to hunt hogs at a friends place outside of Mullin, Texas. Mullin is in Mills County, ten miles west of Goldthwaite. Tim is an E-7 on active duty in the Army and was a close friend of Brad’s. He served in C Troop, 7th Cavalry with Brad for a number of years and was with him for their deployment to Iraq in 2004/5.

After introductions, my friend drove Tim and I through his ranch, a beautiful place with full stock tanks and water running in all the creeks. Several spots clearly showed hog depredations.

This is one of the two hog traps we saw.

Stopping, before a spot where the creek had washed out the road, our host told us to cross the creek and then walk several hundred yards up the creek. After we passed a deer blind start looking for hog sign – droppings and rootings, then pick a spot with a good field of fire.

He added the hogs would come quickly down the creek, almost a natural funnel or mini canyon, and, as it turned out, our choice of 12 gauge shotguns for the job, would be just the trick, since the thick foliage and natural terrain would limit our shots to fifty or sixty yards. Tim was using 00 buck and I had chosen number 1 buck.

Here, Tim’s getting ready and loading up.

By 5:00 PM we were walking up the creek and finding a lot of hog droppings, we picked out our “hides”. Facing east, into the wind, we burrowed into the thick stuff and waited for the hogs to come by. The hogs would be heading south, down the creek and my friend had assured me that the hogs used this trail regularly.

Looking out over my field of fire, pictured, the creek is back by the green stuff and the hogs should come down from left to right, in and along the edge of the cover. But, by 6:00 PM no hogs, by 6:20, with dark approaching, we called it quits and in the twilight, walked back to the truck.

Saturday evening the hogs didn’t chose the trail where we prepared our ambush. No ambush this time out, but, there will be other times when we score big, anyway, if we shot something every time out, they’d call it shooting instead of hunting!