3/15/07

The ‘road to nowhere’ leads to some great hunting
By Terry Madewell
Part Two of Two

Terry Madewell Photo

Having great optics can make your hunt, be it wild boar or deer, more successful and more enjoyable.

Last week we started the hunt down the Road to Nowhere. This week, we finally get somewhere.

It was a quiet evening deep in the Congaree Swamp. It was dark even before the sun set. I was in a swamp bottom, under a big canopy of trees, at the base of a high hill casting a shadow on the area.

As the evening progressed, the birds started their late afternoon flitting. Then the squirrels started scurrying around as they typically do in the evenings when unalerted. Later, as the squirrels began to scamper up the trees to their nests, the deer began to slip through the woods. I heard a couple walking quietly right behind my stand. They were headed “somewhere” further down the Road to Nowhere.

Bruce and Josh had told me to wait in the stand until legal shooting time was up. Hogs, they said, are notorious for late arrivals. Such seemed to be the case this evening. The woods had quieted down again and although I had been surrounded by critters for the previous 45 minutes, it was now quiet and dark.

If I hadn’t known better, I’d felt like that lonely Maytag repairman.

Typically, even with a really good scope, you’ll reach a time where you can no longer see the crosshairs when deer hunting and not be able to make a good shot. This scope performed better than the one I currently use. I kept checking through the scope to see what I could see and I was amazed at the light transmission.

I clicked on the lighted reticle and was really impressed. When I dialed the brightness level down low, I could still clearly see in the woods with the scope and the crosshairs were sharply visible. I still had time if the ole’ hog or hogs would make their entrance.

When I looked away from the scope, the forest was basically black.

So I waited. I listened. I kept checking the scope. Hurry hogs, I remember thinking.

Then I heard the crashing, crunching and grunting of a hog coming through the woods.

It was coming diagonally from my left, from deep in the Congaree Swamp. While the hog was noisy, the rascal seemed not to be in a big hurry to get to the bait. I know that I was anxious about the timing.

Finally the noise and grunting was right in front of me and I could scarcely discern the outline of a black object moving in on the corn. When it stepped into the opening, it snatched an ear of corn and turned and stepped back into a thick scrub of growth.

I put the scope on the hog and could clearly make out the outline of the animal, even through the thicket. But it was not the right shot. I turned the lighted reticle on and wow … I felt that I could pinpoint the shot. But there was too much cover around him for a good, clean shot.

So I had to wait some more. Even in this scope, the light was now fading. It was long past when I would have normally been able to shoot a deer without a lighted reticle, but still legal shooting time. It was just plain ole’ dark back there in Nowhere.

I waited while he crunched his corn. My plan was to take him when he went back for seconds.

What was probably only a minute or two seemed like an hour. Finally, the hog turned and walked back into the opening, but the rascal didn’t stop and grab seconds. He walked right on past the bait and was headed somewhere else down that road to nowhere.

I could make out the black blob crunching through the woods but could not see the crosshairs … until I turned the lighted reticle back on. It was amazing. The light red glow of the cross hairs gave me a super surge of confidence in terms of accurate bullet placement.

I went from being worried about not being able to get a shot to immediately knowing I could place the shot accurately. Bruce had told me if possible to shoot for the head for a clean, quick kill.

I followed the hog as it walked through the tree-lined bottom and took the head shot while it was walking between a clump of leafless hardwoods.

The big, black boar dropped to the forest floor and soon quiet returned to the woods. We had our hog and I had learned a very valuable lesson about modern hunting scopes.

I waited a few minutes, just to see if the boar had any buddies that wanted to come on by, but nothing else turned up. It was cold, I was happy and ready to get this hog out of the woods. The old, black boar weighed in at around 200 pounds. It’s not a giant hog for this area, but certainly larger than any deer I took last season.

Walking back toward the high ground along the Road to Nowhere, I knew this hog hunting trip had already made me a better deer hunter. And maybe, on a stalk hunt we’d planned for the next day, perhaps Bruce, Josh and I could again go somewhere down this same road to nowhere.