Father Comes to the Rescue

His first care was to lift Gyp into a pecan twenty or thirty yards away from where I was roosting, and there the dog struggled to hold himself in the crotch of a limb while father clambered up beside him.

All this while the hogs which were holding me prisoner gave no heed to the noise made by father and Gyp, but continued their efforts to reach me by leaping up against the trunk of the tree until father opened fire, shouting to me as he sent a bullet among them:—

"Are you safe, lad? Have you been hurt?"

"I am all right; but I have dropped my powder horn."

Then father began firing as rapidly as the rifle could be reloaded. There were seventeen in the drove I came upon; three I had killed and two I had wounded, leaving twelve very much alive and very active.

Father killed nine before the survivors decided that the time had come for them to beat a retreat, and when the last of the three trotted off, grunting and gnashing his teeth, I literally dropped from my perch in the pecan, as limp as though I had been ill for some time.

So far as getting a supply of pork was concerned, to say nothing of the saving of my life, it was well father took a hand in the fight, for I, who knew nothing of the peculiarity of these wild hogs, would have allowed the meat to spoil.

There is a gland on the back, filled with a certain disagreeable substance which will make its way through all the meat of the wild hog unless it is removed within a short time after the killing. Father's first act, even before waiting to congratulate me upon my escape, or to ask how I had happened to fall into such a predicament, was to remove these glands, and not until this work had been performed did he give any attention to me.

We dressed the carcasses and hung up the meat on the branches of the trees to save it from being devoured by the wolves; after which, each of us carrying a peccary on his back, we set out for the long tramp home, I promising myself sorrowfully that never again would I go out hog hunting without taking due precautions against being worsted.

I shall spend no more time telling of the hunting which Gyp and I did, even though I am strongly tempted to do so; for we often had rare sport, both on the prairie and in the woods, in search of all kinds of game.

And there was game in great abundance, if we cared to go sufficiently far from home. One year after our arrival, however, there came to the banks of the Trinity four other families who staked out land and thus somewhat interfered with the freedom of our sport. It seemed to me, then, that the country was becoming too thickly settled, for I had to walk no more than five miles in order to reach the house of a man who had been our neighbor in Bolivar County.