Story and Photos by Brad Fitzpatrick
It was just after midnight and the entire world was dark, except for the sphere of green I could see through my night vision binoculars. Our hunting party was trying to stalk through the piney backwoods of east Texas silently, which is much harder than you might imagine even with our goggles in place (night vision, in case you don’t know, confuses the wearer’s depth of ffield until you’re used to wearing them). Mosquitoes droned in our ears; the rice fields and wooded swamps surrounding us were a breeding ground for the irritating bloodsuckers, and there wasn’t a moment that passed when the buzzing in our ears ceased. But as we made our way through the woods and into the open the buzzing was replaced by the steady sloshing of hogs feeding in rice fields. They were in the darkness just ahead.
“Turn on your IR”, our guide said. We did, and a streak of green light rushed from our Crimson Trace laser/ IR units, which were mounted on the underside of our Smith & Wesson AR riles. We moved forward slowly, trying to see the hogs while occasionally looking at the ground below our feet to be certain that we weren’t treading on any water moccasins, and as we eased up over the berm, we looked out into the water at dozens, or perhaps a hundred, feral pigs. The hogs were absolutely decimating a farmer’s looded rice fields. In fact, the damage from hogs was so bad in some areas that rice farmers in east Texas were losing their entire annual crop to pigs. As you can imagine, those farmers were only too happy to have us come in under cover of darkness and shoot some of the thousands of pigs that lived in the piney woods surrounding their fields.
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