While hogs can live in a variety of habitats, they almost always prefer to be close to water. Photo by Michael Skinner.

Late evening is the time for wild pigs to get serious about finding something to eat. Granted, wild hogs seldom turn down any opportunity for a meal, but late evening is the time for them to push their luck. If you play the wind right and know where to watch, you can see them come to openings in creek bottoms or the edge lines of big fields to forage. If you have a good stand setup, it can be the best time to take a big trophy boar.

That's why I love it when a plan comes together. A late-evening hunt with Josh Airey, Bruce Ayers and Heath Rayfield in a hog-infested area of Chester County, and Ayer's hog harvesting plan was coming together perfectly.

Airey and I were hidden in a big tower stand overlooking the edge of a big field, not far from the creek bottom. Ayers and Rayfield were perched in lock-on stands in a heavily used creek bottom where the hogs had been feeding voraciously.

Ayers and Airey are hog hunting fanatics and love to hunt the wild pigs year 'round. Rayfield is the Wildlife Resources Manager for the Buchanan Shoals Sportsman's Preserve, and was the host for our hog hunt. Buchanan Shoals is a 5,000-acre tract of prime hunting land on the Great Pee Dee River. It is certainly a mecca for deer, turkey and quail hunters.

However, this evening, we were a few miles away on a tract of private land that literally was infested with wild pigs. We were hunting in Chesterfield County, just a little north of Chesterfield. Everyone figured the pigs would come in very late, as is their nature. However, on this day, movement started earlier than anticipated and a big black boar in the 250-pound class marched right across the field and started feeding 20 minutes before dark. He soon had another half-dozen big hogs feeding with him, along with a few smaller pigs, about 100 yards from our stand.

It's the type of setup a hog hunter dreams about. There were several big pigs so engrossed in feeding they had no clue we were in their field. Airey and I were armed with a .270 with a Burris 4-16 power scope with a lighted reticle. The only thing that could go wrong would be not to shoot.

Airey and I are still not quite sure how that actually happened.

The plan was for Ayers and Rayfield to open fire first since they were in the woods where darkness creeps in earlier. However, they were at much closer range than us. We were to be ready to shoot as soon as they fired. I hate to admit it in one way, but with text messaging and silent cell phones, it's really not a problem for hunters to communicate silently and coordinate a plan of attack. The problem was, because of the close quarters, the hogs Ayers and Rayfield had feeding on their bait busted them -- the noses of hogs do more than find food; the sense of smell is the hog's first and best means of avoiding danger. And hogs always believe their noses: If they smell danger, they do not wait to identify the source of the danger with their eyes and they don't stand around with their heads cocked trying to listen for a confirmation of the danger -- no, the hog will just run, and that's what these pigs did. We waited for Ayers and Rayfield to shoot until it was too late for us to shoot.

"The Burris Lighted Reticle scope is the best low-light scope I've ever used, but regardless of what you have, there's a point when it simply gets too late to safely to pull the trigger," Airey said.