Fortunately, the hog was in easy reach of the club’s front-end loader and there were several folks back at the clubhouse to help hoist the hog onto the tractor and back to the skinning shed. There is a lesson to be learned here. If you’re going after big hogs, spend a few minutes trying to figure out how you might actually get the hog out of the woods.

Wild hogs were the last things on Hallam Cottingham’s mind when he had his mega-hog encounter. As a matter of fact, he had never seen a wild hog in the woods. He was hunting a big deer that he had scouted out on his family’s land down near Gallivant’s Ferry when he heard “the most god-awful sound I had ever heard. It sounded like a hog squealing into a coffee can, sort of a tinny, blood-curdling sound. I had never heard anything like it,” Cottingham said.

“It was getting dark and I had left my flashlight back at the truck about 1,000 yards away. The road back to the truck was lined with river canes, and you couldn’t see 2 feet off the road, so I really didn’t know what to do. I either had to get down and go through the area where the hog sounds were coming from or stay up there until about 11 o’clock when somebody would come looking for me.

“I could see two dark figures out near the road, so I knew generally where they were. I decided that I would get down and take my chances. When I got near a corn field, I could hear the hogs running around squealing in the field. I slipped around and got into position and I could see a huge boar hog chasing a sow round and round in the field. I had always heard that wild hogs have a thick leather shield on the shoulder, so I waited until he was quartering away and took the shot with my .30/06. He dropped like a rock.

“I was hunting with a friend of mine and I knew he would hear the shot. When he got there, he said that he had heard that awful racket, too. He had already come down out of his stand, but decided it would be, ‘more prudent’ to get back up in his stand. As we approached the big hog, I was thinking, OK, it’s time for a big barbeque. That’s a quarter-ton of hog meat. However, when we got close, we got a whiff of the most horrible foul, rank smelling thing you could think of. Needless to say, there was no barbeque celebration.”

It’s a shame the meat was so foul. The hog weighed in at 601 pounds. That’s quite a bit of pulled pork and wild hog hash. But anyone who has ever scent-tracked a big boar hog through the woods can attest that older, big-bodied boar hogs emit a scent that can turn even a strong stomach sour.

Cottingham said that when they looked the hog over, they noticed that his tusks were broken off and that he had several wounds from fighting. “Some of the wounds looked so fresh that they may have actually been from that evening while he was chasing the sow,” Cottingham said. “He also had a big bulge on his shoulder, which turned out to be somebody’s bullet from a long time ago.”