Photo by Polly Dean

It is only natural that a hog hunter gets excited when he has a wild boar in his sights. Wild hogs are dangerous game, and the degree of excitement is often proportional to the size of the hog.

The sight of a 150-pound porker gets you keyed up and focused on making a good shot. An encounter with a 350-pound wild hog can make you lose your cool. If you happen to have a 400- or even a 500-pound boar hog standing in front of you with gleaming white 4-inch tusks sticking out the sides of his snout, it may rattle your nerves to the point that you might wish you had decided to go fishing.

Now try to imagine the effect that standing up close and personal to a monster wild hog that stands waist high, with 6-inch tusks, and weighing in the range of 800 to 1,000 pounds has on a hunter. That’s exactly what happened to Terry Anderson, a Pickens County hog hunter who ended up taking a hog that honestly defies all logic and description.

Here’s the story. Anderson, who hunts wild hogs all over the upstate from the Musterground area in the mountains to “down around Calhoun Falls,” makes at least one trip up to a Tennessee hunting reserve each year to take a crack at the Volunteer State’s wild hogs. “I had been wanting for several years to kill a real trophy hog,” Anderson said. “I had hunted this place before and we knew there was a big hog in there. The guys that I was hunting with had seen him and figured him to be around 600 pounds.”

“We were hunting with dogs and when we got to the place where we were going to hunt, there were seven hogs in there that we could see. Then we looked up on the ridge above those hogs and there were two more real big hogs standing around up there. I went up on the ridge to see if I could get a shot at one of those big hogs.”

It was at that point that Anderson realized that this hog was much bigger than anything he had ever seen. Hunting with a short 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun loaded with slugs, Anderson wondered if he was under-gunned.

“I went from tree to tree to line up a shot,” Anderson said. “He was out about 45 to 50 yards and I took the shot. The hog went down and floundered around on the ground, and then he got up. I shot him again and he went down a second time, and then he got up again. I shot again and he went down for a third time. This time he started bleeding pretty good out of the snout, so I knew he was done for.”

After having the hog mounted by a taxidermist, he let his hunting buddy, John Garner, who happens to own a hunting and fishing store in the town of Liberty in Pickens County, hang the hog head on the wall for all to see. Garner said that since the monster hog, estimated to weigh 900 pounds, has been on the wall, “About 3,000 people have come by to see it. Surprisingly, most of them have been non-hunters,” Garner said.