I’ve written previously about my love for bombing around the bajadas of the Sonoran desert in a clapped-out old Toyota in pursuit of the mysterious and, thankfully, largely under-appreciated skunk pig.
The javelina.
I think that any hunt can be what you make it. Easy, hard, comfortable, not. However you want to play it, there is no right or wrong. After a half-decade of exclusively hunting public land from T or C to Couer d’Alene and all of the super-serious social media-oriented posturing that goes along with the culture at this point, I am comfortable enough with myself to be able to admit that I enjoy taking it a bit easy from time to time, and the annual father/son javelina hunt that we embark on every year is the perfect opportunity to… dare I say? — actually enjoy a damn hunt for once.
The wall tent comes out, and so do a few camping tables and the huge, old, and very green Coleman stove. The camp chairs and tables and the propane heater. Ten gallons of spare gas and seven of water… just barely enough. We drive around, walk a bit, and cover ground until we find something of interest. Desert grasslands, live oaks, acacias, and junipers provide the scenery.
It’s not Africa, but I think it’s just about as close as we can get on this side of the pond.
It’s a point of near shame for me to admit that I have not yet actually sealed the deal on one of these pungent critters. No fault of the universe’s… shots taken and missed the past two hunts. Nobody’s fault but mine, actually. This year would be different.
Friday morning we made coffee and hot chocolate with the rising sun and then climbed into my beloved old warrior Toyota and hit the forest roads. Thirty in the morning to sixty five in the day as we drove and glassed and drove and glassed and drove some more, stopping to check tanks frequently.
They were almost all bone dry. It has been a perniciously dry winter out in Sin City, and that appeared to hold true here as well. Whichever water they could find was likely to be used heavily; not just by them, but by deer and coyotes and everything else out here too. We’d get out, hike around, check for sign, and then on to the next one.
We decided to check out a new area of the unit this year. Rather than the classic saguaro- and prickly pear-strewn hillsides of the lower country, we were surrounded by thick live oaks and catclaws that turned into junipers up by camp. Glassing in any real sense was essentially impossible here.
I had enough foresight to make alternate preparations if the hunting turned out to be slow — we could still get our shooting in one way or another, so I turned off down a dead-end forest road and bumped into a side-by-side of other hunters. The driver’s son had shot a pig opening day with a .243, and he was still holding out hope of crushing one with the 8 3/4″ .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum he was toting around. We talked about how dry everything was, except for an old concrete guzzler that we bumped some deer off of this morning. He knew exactly what we were referring to.
We went our separate ways and my dad and I punched holes in paper for a bit and ate lunch.
We bounced along down an unforgiving power line road until we hit the highway, then headed back to camp once again.
For the last full day of the hunt, we decided to head back to where we had gotten into pigs the past two years. This used to be a great spot; plenty of roads, cell service, and gas nearby. Camping was always a bit of a challenge as all the hunters tended to squeeze into one spit of BLM. Weather could go one way or the other. We’ve had eighty degree days and one Walmart tent collapse in a pummeling snowstorm over the years. That was fun, in retrospect…
Then the land swap happened and we lost all of the roads. All of the core drilling platforms we used to glass off of — or shoot from. Access became restricted and there was less of a feeling of completely unbridled adventure since we actually had pay attention to the map more than the actual hunt. So we went somewhere else this year.
But now we were back, and I climbed up the side of the mountain where they were hanging out last year. Semi-fresh javelina scat abounded, as well as those nibbled-on prickly pears that we always looked for. It was nice being back in the typical Sonoran habitat. It felt like home.
I picked my way up a denser south-facing slope through the thicket of live oaks that I had called them in from before. I heard a woofing and then blew the distress call and they came in, as if on script. No such vocalizations today, and I still hunted my way to the top of the ridge and found a nice spot to glass from for just a bit. I picked up service and saw that dad wasn’t seeing anything down his way either. I glassed and then called for maybe fifteen minutes, then slowly picked my way back down the mountain and to the truck where we cracked open a few club sodas to beat the midmorning heat.
We decided to spend the rest of the day slowly working back to camp and checking various waterholes in the low country along the way. Nothing moving, nothing out. We made it back to camp and got a roaring fire going as we sat around and ate dinner and finished the last beer of the trip under the splash of the Milky Way and the Halloween glow of the bonfire.
I do a lot of serious hunts. The past few years I’ve had desirable bull tags and I would have been damned to accept anything less than a punched tag on those hunts. They’re usually little fun in the moment. Getting up at 0400 and immediately hitting the trail, only to get back well after dark, fall into the sleeping back, and do it all again in six hours. Never any time for a fire to simply stop and smell the sagebrush for a bit.
That’s fine, of course. There’s a time and a place for everything and when those opportunities present themselves, it behooves one to take advantage.
These yearly hunts are different, though. Success, in the usual definition of the word, is a secondary objective. Perhaps even tertiary. These are hunts where I get to do things that I would otherwise never do. Make dinner on the Coleman. Sit around the fire and drink a beer. Spend time with my dad, who now lives around 2,300 miles away. Drive around a bit and enjoy the beauty of the West. Get breakfast at one of our usual places on the way back. Not be at 100% all of the damn time.
This is what I really look for with each trip.
On our way out, we happened to run into those same hunters at a gas station. They were sticking around still, with hopes of introducing a collared peccary to 300 grains of Hornady XTP.
He said that he drove by that guzzler the day after we talked, and there was a fresh gut pile there from an unlucky javelina. It could have been ours, with better timing.
Next year it is.
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