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Spring Break Hogs

Dylan Hayward



There aren’t many times I reflect on my college years, and that’s intentional. But my sophomore year was memorable. It was spring break and all of my friends were headed to either Miami or Los Angeles, and I couldn’t have been less interested. I recall a friend telling me in my economics class, “Dude, we’re going to be drinking all day by the beach, you have to come!” “Sounds fun?” I said, half sarcastically and half genuinely confused as to why someone would find that fun. I wasn’t much of a heavy drinker. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the occasional beer or a good bourbon. Because I did. And I do. But I could think of better things to do with my week off from my university's constant attempt of liberal indoctrination. Instead of daydreaming about chugging cheap beer, staying in a shit hotel, trying and failing to pick up chicks by the beach, most of my daydreams were about bowhunting. Now, just because I wasn’t going to be wasted at a Ramada in Florida with a bunch of frat dudes and sorority chicks that still currently live off their parents, didn’t mean I was staying at home for spring break. Afterall, hunting season had been over in the midwest for a few months, and I was itching to get out and kill something. But as the story usually goes, I was a poor college student whose idea of making some extra cash during the semester was donating plasma and selling coonskin caps. So it would have to be a cheap hunt. And what was the best way for a broke college kid to create bloodshed on some animals on a budget? Texas hogs. So I packed my shit and headed to the airport to catch a flight to South Texas, where my buddy’s parents had a ranch and apparently some wild hogs. On the first day that I was there, I spotted a giant, three hundred and something pound boar, working an old Texas dirt road. I waited until he was broadside, placed my pin right behind the shoulder, and released. Damn, it felt like a good shot. CRACK! The better part of my arrows snaps off as if it hit a brick wall and I stand there clueless as the boar takes off. My buddy looks at me and asks mid-laugh “Ever heard of the subcutaneous shield?” “No, what the hell is that” Turns out, there is a thick shield that covers the entire shoulder and most of the upper body on wild hogs, specifically mature boars. Making it a challenging, but very doable, archery shot. Pissed off, we decide to try and get on another boar. I spot one walking quickly through a patch of mesquite trees with his nose down. What these things lack in eyesight they make up for in ability to smell, so I try to get downwind of him. He is now at 40 yards, slightly quartering away, and I place my pin a few inches further back than I would on a whitetail. I see my lighted nock sticking out of the ground behind him, clean pass through, he only ran about 60 yards. As we get back to the house, and start cutting up the hog, I get a message from my friend down in Miami. It was a picture of him and another friend with two beautiful girls on their shoulders, playing chicken at the resort pool. “Dumbasses” I thought. Here I was, having the time of my life, about to eat some gamey bacon, bowhunting hogs, in 95 degree heat, severely bug bitten, sleeping in a double wide. While those guys were down in south Florida, drinking mojitos on the beach, hanging out with gorgeous women in bikinis. “What’s wrong with them?” That question popped into my head at least a hundred times that night as I lay on what must have been a 30 year old cot. “Are sunbathing college chicks really better than 300lb Texas hogs?" I was on a plane to Miami by 9am the next morning.

I guess they are. 


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