Got back from my boar hunt in Vermont on Saturday night. I took a nice 180lb running male at under 100 yards with one shot from my .300 Win Mag with a 180gr Partition. My BIL took a 225lb'er. They're both hanging in one of my walk-in coolers at work now. I'll probably hang for them two weeks, and then butcher them both.



We were at a preserve called Wild Hill in Fairlee. The guy that owns it has several hundred black beauties running around in 2000 acres. There were only five guys there this weekend, so they used Plott hounds to flush and track the pigs. It was great fun watching the dogs work. One had just given birth to six puppies two weeks ago, and she was tireless. They worked all day long; I've never seen anything like it. Temperatures were in the low 20s with a couple of inches of snow on the ground, and sunny on Saturday.



Plott hounds were originally bred in Germany for bear hunting and brought here in 1750. Since the 1930s they have been used in this country for bear, boar, racoons and mountain lions. They'll bring their prey to bay, or tree them.



http://www.akc.org/breeds/recbreeds/plotthnd.cfm



http://www.treehound.com/treehound/html/plott.html



One boar took a bad hit by another hunter and I was able to get up to it and get very close in for a killing shot, but not before he charged me. It's another world diametrically opposed to the bird dog world when the owner was yelling for me to take a shot while his dogs were dancing all around the boar, nipping at his feet and ass the whole time. I had to get in to about 15 feet to get a clear alley for a shot.



It's one preserve hunt I'll do year after year. I may do it with a flintlock longrifle next year.



On another note, there was a thread on the SSM BBS about gut piles a few weeks ago. I think Thorny was complaining about them being around for weeks or something stupid like that. Still, I was amazed to see a couple that had been completely devoured by ravens and coyotes in under four hours in daylight.