Sunlight touched the tops of the highest mountains and flowed down the slopes like molten honey. Smoke from hundreds of fireplaces hung in the valleys, painting the frosty sky with streaks of rose and orange.
In the back of the bakkie (pickup truck) we were following, a collection of hounds scrabbled for footing on the swaying bed. By the time we reached the garbage dump that was our destination, they had worked themselves into a confusion of wagging tails, barks, and yelps, letting us know they were ready to hunt!
Hannes Marais, the wildlife officer I was riding with, introduced me to Rory Guthrie, the Professional Hunter who was supervising the group of men piling off the bakkies. While we stood around drinking coffee, Rory pointed out the porcine tracks around the dump. The dogs were unloaded and unleashed. They raced about the dump with happy abandon, yelping, tails wagging frantically. Then they scattered in two directions, some going downslope through the eucalyptus trees and the rest heading upslope through logging slash.
One group of men went downhill with the first bunch of dogs; Rory and his wife, Hannes, and I followed the latter group. I thought how much this was like hunting feral pigs at home: drop the dogs, wait for them to cut a track, then run like mad after them. But we weren't hunting feral pigs. We were in South Africa, on the trail of native bush pigs.
Closely related to our ubiquitous domestic hog, the bush pig is one of South Africa's most serious agricultural pests, doing millions of dollars a year in damage to crops such as manioc and corn. Bush pigs eat mostly roots, bulbs, and fallen fruit, rooting industriously with their hard snouts, digging trenches and excavating roots with their tusks. To keep bush pigs out of their fields, native farmers cut large numbers of saplings to build solid fences. So bush pigs also cause indirect damage to forests as small farmers try desperately to protect their subsistence.
THE DOGS WE WERE FOLLOWING worked their way up the slope through year-old logging slash and head-high regrowth. I was panting heavily; I'm a flatlander, and we were running up the side of a mountain at several thousand feet. Before long I broke out onto a another red sand road, and was relieved to see Rory and his wife and Hannes all walking up it instead of climbing again. Despite their hurry, the dogs were quiet. Occasionally one would bay a time or two, but then it would fall silent again. Rory pointed to pig tracks in the road and shook his head.
"They were here last night," he said, with his rolling Afrikaans accent. "But it's too dry, and the wind has been blowing all night. The dogs can't smell them."
Indeed, though we followed the dogs for more than an hour through Australian eucalyptus and American pines, they never cut a track. Every little while one of them would break out of the trees and come to Rory wagging its tail and looking up at him plaintively as if to say, "Where are the pigs, Boss? I know they have to be here somewhere, but I just can't find them!"
By now the sun was up, and the day was beginning to warm. Far away, on the next mountain, Rory heard the other pack of dogs break into a chorus of hound-song. He dashed back down the road for the bakkie and picked us and the dogs up a few minutes later on his way back up the mountain. We would go across the top of the mountain and down the other side, he said. That way we'd catch up to the other group faster than if we went down and around. Only it didn't work that way. Oh, we got up the mountain all right. But when we started back down we found ourselves on a logging road covered with rocks the size of bread loaves. After we had lurched our way into two dead-ends, Rory could no longer hear the dogs and we didn't know where we were.
DISHEARTENED, WE STARTED BACK DOWN. When we got to the bottom we tried to go back to the garbage dump. But somewhere we went up a different road than the one we started out on, and we found ourselves in the ditch headed uphill at about a 45-degree angle. It took half an hour to reconnect with enough strong men to literally lift the bakkie out of the ditch and put it back onto the clay road.
Such is pig hunting, I thought. I remembered a night hunting feral hogs on the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation in south Florida when we found ourselves up to our knees in water, facing an angry boar, with nothing to climb but cypress trees the size of my arm. Yes, bush pig hunting in Africa and feral pig hunting in this country definitely are related.
After several hours of this, we gave it up and went to find breakfast. Rory explained that bush pig hunting, like a lot of other hunting, often is a feast-or-famine proposition. Some days the dogs with hit the trail of a sounder--a family group--immediately and are able to stay with it. On those days, hunters may kill the entire sounder. But other days are like the one on which we hunted; things just don't go right, and hunters don't turn up any bush pigs at all.
Rory is from a hunting family. His father and two uncles grew up on a farm where they hunted as children, and Rory and his brother followed suit. "Twenty years ago, there weren't very many pigs around," he told me. "Then they just boomed. Everyone was complaining about how hard they are to shoot. My dad and uncles came up with the idea to get a dog pack together."
That was in 1988. A friend of Rory's who uses a dog pack for predator control of jackal and caracal, a small wildcat, came and hunted pigs with them a couple of times to get them started. Rory said that despite the increasing number of bush pigs in South Africa, his family is the only group of hunters in the Eastern Transvaal area doing bush pig control.
The crop that bush pigs damage the most is maize, or corn, Rory said. After a sounder of pigs has been through a field, the corn looks like it's been trampled by cattle.
"For a normal farmer planting maize, they can do up to 30 percent of damage to the maize," Rory's father said. That's the difference between success and failure for a farmer.
WHY HAS THE BUSH PIG POPULATION increased so much? Rory said it's a combination of factors. Thirty years ago, swine fever decimated bush pig populations. But with plenty of food and cover available, and a lack of large predators, bush pig numbers have recovered. And because they're active at night, few people go to the trouble of sitting out to wait for them.
"Of course you must realize that the sow has a litter twice a year," his father added. "And she can have between three and five babies. The multiplication of her pigs is double to any other of our animals."
In the late 1980s, local farmers were skeptical of the Guthries' ability to track down and kill pigs without harming other game. But as their success with their hound pack grew, so did their reputation. Now, if a farmer has a problem he calls Rory for help.
"During the maize season we have a choice of four or five farms on a Saturday," Rory's father said. "Everybody complains. Also in the nut season." Bush pigs love pecan nuts, a transplant from America. "They pull the branches of pecan nut trees down and break them off," Rory added.
Like our domestic hogs, bush pigs can do a fair amount of damage to a dog. Rory showed me a set of tusks; they'd do any of our big feral boars proud.
"We have had a problem with having guests hunt with us," Rory said. "If the dogs have got a boar bayed up and they don't get there quick enough, and we get there and we don't shoot and we're waiting for this guy to catch up, in the meantime dogs are getting hell beat out of them. We lost two dogs in a day that way." Rory keeps a full surgery kit on the bakkie, with needles and sutures and everything else they need in it.
Also like our feral pigs, bush pig meat is good to eat. Though he doesn't feed pork to the dogs, Rory said young bush pig in particular is very good and very lean.
Quite apart from his bush pig hunting, as a Professional Hunter Rory Guthrie takes many American clients hunting for Africa's "traditional" big game species. In the past couple of years, he has added bush pig hunting to the repertoire of hunts he offers. His bush pig rates start about 100 Rand a day, which amounts to about $30 U.S.; the rate goes up if the client wants Rory to make any other arrangements for him and depending on the group size. He doesn't charge any additional trophy fees; the client can shoot as many animals as he or she likes for the daily rate.
About Bush Pigs
Bush pigs are closely related to our home-grown domestic or feral pig. Domestic pigs are Sus scrofa; bush pigs are Potamochoerus porcus. Both are members of the swine family, Suidae.
Bush pigs generally are smaller than our pigs. Females reach up to 119 pounds, males 253 pounds at maturity. They're colorful and hairy, with long tasseled ears. Pigs in the eastern and southern savanna areas are dark brown to light black, but those in East Africa are a colorful red. Piglets are dark, with rows of lighter spots. Bush pigs live in wooded habitat, swamps, and marshes. They eat mostly roots, bulbs, and fruit, but they don't turn down excrement, carrion, or small animals when they can get them. They cause millions of dollars of crop damage annually by rooting in agricultural fields. Mostly nocturnal, bush pigs will forage during the day if not bothered by humans.
Family groups are called sounders, and usually consist of one boar and several sows with their piglets. Most sounders contain 15 to 20 pigs, though groups as large as 40 have been recorded. The home range of a sounder may be anywhere from about 50 acres to about 2,500 acres, depending on resource availability.
(Source: The Safari Companion, Richard D. Estes, Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1993.)
Copyright (c) 1995 Carolee Boyles-Sprenkel. All rights reserved.
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