Story by Tom Claycomb III

All of my farming and ranching buddies are going to be upset with me for saying this but wild hogs have added a whole new realm of hunting opportunities for hunters. I can say this now because I don’t farm or ranch anymore so they don’t financially impact me but if you’re a farmer/rancher, you automatically put them in the same category as cock roaches, which is understandable.

Some 60 years ago, being raised in North Texas I didn’t even know what a wild hog was. I’d never seen one. Then during college, I was working one summer on a pipeline in the Hageman Wildlife Refuge on Lake Texoma. One day I saw a big sounder of 25-30 hogs feeding along a creek. I assumed due to the recent rains they had escaped from a local farmers pen.

Then I heard a few rumblings of how that there were some wild hogs around Sadler. I lived in Sherman and our land was up by Callisburg. Sadler was about halfway in-between.

It will sound weird to younger readers but in those days, there was no internet. There was one weekly fishing report in the Sherman Democrat written by Max Eggleston but there were no local outdoor magazines, regional magazines, hunting YouTubes or websites where knowledge was passed around at the speed of light. Turns up there were some wild hogs not 20 miles from my house and I didn’t even know it.

In those days there were little country stores. We’d go up to the Mask store north of our place for a Coke mid-morning which was where you found out most of the local news. The local ranchers would be setting on a turned over Coke case and be shooting the bull.

This is how I met Clarence Skaggs, the foreman that ran the big Kay Kimball ranch. He gave me free rein to hunt, fish and trap on their sprawling ranch. It’s a wonder I didn’t get lost forever since I was only eight-years old.

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