Young Ones:
Even though they are not the most handsome animals they have a heart as big as a tiger and are a very noble beast and I saw it firsthand. While we were stalking zebras we came upon an anthill at 3 -4 paces, it was windy and had rained so we did not make much noise while we walked through the grass and the wind was to our face. In this anthill was a hole and we could see the snout and tusks of a wart hog, he was playing dead. Slowly Clayton extended the shooting sticks (we were standing to one side and behind the entrance), the warthog jumped out, changing his direction towards us in midair and came full lick towards us, in that millisecond the tracker, Clayton and me squealed like little girls and tried to jump out of the way, I was frantically pulling my rifle off my shoulders and trying to chamber a round while extending the gun like a spear ( had learnt the hard way while hunting hogs with hounds in California that a scoped rifle is useless at that range so your best bet is to point and shoot). My rule while hunting and driving within a property is never chamber a round till you are ready to shoot and never drive in a car with one up the spout. Immediately behind the boar came a sow and a little piglet and they ran straight away from us. I realized then that the boar had done a real or mock charge at us to let the female and kids escape. For good reason some of my human friends may not do the same for their nagging spouses.
They are intricately linked with ants and aardwolf. There are numerous small anthills that are as strong as concrete, cattlemen would try to use pesticides on these since nothing grows on them, the aardwolf is an animal that looks like a hyena but is much smaller and was nearly wiped out by ranchers, it only eats termites and ants. They dig into the anthill and move on after their meal, the wart hogs then enlarge these burrows and use them as dens with their snouts and tusks protecting the entrance. In this next picture just behind the yellow flowers you can see an anthill and before it an aardwolf.
So you may ask, where is the info on this hunt. Here we were sitting down with a glorious view and enjoying the great deli cold cuts and bread that this region offers due to its heavy density of German settlers and German ex pats that live there.:
I was sitting on the empty chair facing the windows and through the window above my younger son’s head saw a warthog walking down the hill, I pointed it out to Clayton, he used his binoculars and excitedly told my younger son to come with him. I realized that it must be big as Clayton had turned down several we had seen till then. Clayton had my younger son quickly take up position on some rocks outside of the cottage. You can see the warthog in the distance over Claytons left shoulder:
Clayton took his time insuring that it was an older mature animal
My son took one shot with the Sako 22 – 250 and hit it a little behind, the boar stopped, mortally wounded and settled into the grass, we could see he was not moving, everyone quickly scrambled to a better angle:
My son took another shot that missed, down wards angle, grass and crosswinds, then Clayton moved him to another angle and as the animal got to its feet another shot was taken and this time it went down. It was a big animal so the tractor was called:
Congratulations all around:
It was a grand old warrior that had lost one of its lower tusks in an unknown battle, the one on the far side:
My son was elated as he wants to hunt the ugly five, we did look for hyena for him but drew a blank, maybe next time.
