THE CALL OF THE WILD BOAR…GIGGLING By: Tracey Splechter

Some hunters would say you can’t “call” in wild boar, however my sister and I would disagree.

Our first boar hunting adventure to Oklahoma had been planned for many months.  This would be the first time my twin sister, Stacey would venture into the great outdoors on a hunting trip.  It took many hours of convincing her she would love it if she only gave it a shot!  She took her hunter’s safety course earlier this summer so she was ready and prepared to handle her rifle.  We also spent a few weekends practicing at our homemade rifle range at my home.

The weekend in September finally arrived for us to make the 4.5 hour drive to Oklahoma.  We planned to arrive at the lodge by 4:30 so we could get settled and ready for the next day’s hunt.  Little did we know that once we arrived, we would be in our hunting stand within 30 minutes of unpacking our bags.  We were stoked!  So, it was now 5:15 and we were settled in our stand with our gear and were getting familiar with our new surroundings.  As we sat there, trying to be quiet and watch for game, we couldn’t help the urge to giggle about everything.  Every small noise we made, her breaking her visor, my chair creaking, her cell phone ringing (because she forgot to put it to vibrate) and even the thought of who was going to shoot first, had us rolling.  Well it seemed to work because within 30 minutes of being in our stand, the first pig walks out.  We judged his size and determined he was a shooter but I told her “No way am I shooting the very first thing that walks by us, the very first day and in the first few minutes of hunting.”  She agreed and we watched the boar as he made his way around the feeder and then off into the woods.  Again more giggling and again another boar.  The second pig was quite a bit smaller than the first so we decided we would let this one go as well.  About 30 more minutes passed, several more bouts of laughter and one more hog!  It never failed just as we were at the peak of our giggles, a hog would appear out of the woods.  Was this coincidence or was our giggling working?  We decided we were not letting this one get away, so I readied myself for the shot and she grabbed the video camera.  He made a few passes behind the feeder and then came around to the right and left himself wide open!  KABOOM went my rifle and off ran the pig.  Stacey said, “You missed him, he ran off!”

I told her, “I didn’t miss him, I had a good shot and he is probably just a few yards off in the trees.”  We tried calling the guides to let them know we had a pig down but, in southern Oklahoma our cell phones did not want to cooperate.  However, we did get a text message out to them to let them know to head our direction.  I had made the shot just about 7pm so we had about one hour before dark.  It took the guides a while to arrive and by the time they did it was pitch black outside.  Stacey, being a city girl and all, didn’t want to get out of the truck to help the guides track the pig, but I talked her into it.  We showed the guides the location of where the pig was when I shot and told them the direction in which it ran.  Aaron, a newbie to the outfit, instantly found a trace of blood and was hot on the trail.  It didn’t take him long to find it; my first wild boar!  I was shaking hands and there were high five’s all around.  We loaded the pig in the back of a truck to get him back to the lodge for pictures and processing.  The outfitter has a great set up where you can have the guides processing your animal or you can choose to do so yourself.  While the guides were hard at work, Stacey and I went in to get cleaned up for dinner.  The meals ranged from hamburgers and steaks in the evenings to biscuits and gravy for brunch.  Don, the cook, was amazing!  I would definitely recommend to all hunters to pay the little extra to have your meals prepared for you while hunting.

The next day and a half of hunting proved to be uneventful as the weather was either extremely hot or raining.  It turns out that we shouldn’t have passed up those first two pigs as Stacey never had her chance at taking her first boar.  We still had a great time enjoying nature while relaxing in the comfort of our custom built, elevated stands.  We are planning a trip to go back in late winter of 2011!  This time frame should give her the opportunity for her first kill as well as additional opportunities for myself.

The camp is located near Mill Creek, Oklahoma.  It is a rustic, but very comfortable cabin that can accommodate up to six hunters.  Enjoy satellite TV in the living room or hanging out in the outdoor pavilion, discussing the day’s hunt.  There is a large, fully equipped kitchen for those who choose to cook their own meals.  Hunters can choose from many stand locations dispersed on 8,500 acres of a working cattle ranch.  In the afternoon, you can choose to fish in Pennington Creek for smallmouth bass or jump in the trucks with the guides for a tour of the ranch.  Processing facilities as well as a walk-in cooler are available to store your animal until your hunt is over.  The guides will process your animal for you for a small fee and help pack it for the drive home.  The guides are all very knowledgeable about the land and the game as well as very friendly.  I would recommend this destination to anyone looking for a quality hog, deer or turkey hunt!

Just remember the next time you are sitting in your stand and not having any luck, try it…giggle.

December’s “Woman of the Wild”-Holly Heyser

Holly A. Heyser, hunting blogger and college lecturer

I am pretty much the last person anyone – including myself – would have expected to take up hunting. I was born in Southern California and have spent all of my adult life in urban areas. After college, I spent 19 years as a newspaper reporter and editor (Orange County Register, San Jose Mercury News, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Virginian-Pilot, Sacramento Bee) before leaving the business in 2006 to teach journalism at my alma mater, California State University, Sacramento. Reporter. Professor.

Urbanite. Not someone you think of as a gunner.

But I have always craved unusual experiences, and hunting started worming its way into my realm of possibility back when I was in my late 30s. I was living in St. Paul, Minnesota, with my boyfriend Hank Shaw, and we were both working for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. We had befriended the hunting and fishing writer there – Chris Niskanen – and what he did was really piquing Hank’s interest. One day Hank announced that he wanted to take up hunting. “That’s fine,” I said. He’s a cook, so I knew he’d eat what he’d kill, which was my threshold of acceptance for hunting.

 He was really getting into it, spending a lot of time out in the woods, and pretty soon he started asking if I’d like to join him. I didn’t, because I was busy training for marathons at that point, and I rightfully concluded that I couldn’t fit two activities that intense into my weekends. But a couple years later we moved to Sacramento, and I stopped running, and I finally said I was ready to join him. My first hunt was a pheasant hunt, but what really grabbed me was duck hunting. Half of the ducks in the Pacific Flyway spend their winter in the Sacramento Valley about an hour north of us, and the duck hunting can be amazing. I will hunt anything that I’m willing to eat – pheasants, turkeys, wild boar, deer – but there’s just something about ducks. They’re fast, the marshy terrain is challenging and the worse the weather, the better the hunting. I love a challenge. And ducks taste divine. Duck is by far my favorite meat, followed closely by wild boar.

I very quickly dedicated myself to my new pursuit. I had just started my teaching job and was overjoyed when I realized my winter break covered the last six weeks of duck season, so when Hank was working, I’d drive up to one of my favorite wildlife refuges and head out into the marsh myself, determined to teach myself how to actually hit these birds. (Three years later, I’m sorta kinda getting the hang of it.)

 A year to the day after I fired my shotgun for the first time ever, I started a blog about hunting, NorCal Cazadora (www.norcalcazadora.com). NorCal stands for Northern California, and “cazadora” is Spanish for huntress. I figured no one would care what a novice hunter had to say, but boy was I wrong. I quickly found that even the most veteran hunters enjoyed the frustration-filled tales of trying to learn how to do this hunting stuff right. Since, then, I’ve expanded a bit and have begun writing for magazines including California Waterfowl, Delta Waterfowl and Turkey Country, and I’ve done quite a few hunting stories for the Sacramento Bee, which has shown amazing openness to hunting.

I’ve also taken up photography, and do a lot of food photos for my boyfriend, who started a blog shortly after I did – Hunter Angler Gardener Cook (www.honest-food.net) – and writes for a variety of food magazines. I’ll be doing photography for his upcoming book as well.

Writing and photography has opened many doors. I’ve begun doing a lot of volunteer work for California Waterfowl, which graciously honored me with its Artemis Award this year. And I’ve made friends all over the country and world, which means if I can afford a plane ticket someplace, I could probably find someone to hunt with there. I feel incredibly blessed.

Probably the biggest blessing, though, is having been able to enter the hunting world in the first place. I was not naïve about where food came from before I started hunting – I spent some time in the country as a kid, and my family raised a lot of animals for meat. But participating in food, nature and the cycle of life at this level has been a revelation, and it has improved both what I eat and how much I appreciate it exponentially. So many things had to fall into place to get me here: meeting Hank, moving to Minnesota, befriending Chris. There are any number of different choices I could have made that would have put me on a different path. But I got lucky, and I’m incredibly grateful for that.