Scored on the last day of Small Game

So my daughter decided she didn’t want to go hunting on Sunday morning. I don’t blame her, I think I wore the soles off her shoes the previous weekend. I promised her that we would find a spot and sit, but she didn’t want to go. I end up texting a buddy around midnight to see if he wanted to go out in the morning. He said yes so I told him I’d pick him up around 6:30.
6 A.M. rolls around and I’m dragging. I text him to see if he’s up (hoping he’s not) and he says yes. I say ok and pick him up. We get out in the woods around 7:30 and do some walking. He hears something in the palmettos and I tell him you go after it. Two people walking through palmettos will be too loud. He start in and comes back about 20 minutes later. It gave him the slip and he never did see what it was.
After that we start walking down the trail some more and I see a large field with palmetto clumps in it. I say let’s look in here. We get to walking and I see something out of the corner of my eye. He’s a little taller than me and he says I see something. Next thing I know I see this hog running towards us. I tell him get ready cause he’s coming fast and he’s going to run right between these clumps of palmettos. Sure enough, he runs right where I said and as soon as he cleared the bushes I fire. Then my buddy fires and I see this hog running away. I yell at my buddy “Rack another one and shoot!” He racks another shell and shoots, but by that time he was high tailing it out of there. I knew we hit him cause I had the bead on him and when he cleared the bushes, but he ran for a while.
Next thing I hear is someone yelling “Hey, We’re over here!” Turns out that there was a guy and his son squirrel hunting and they kinda pushed him our way. He was yelling out to make sure we weren’t slinging lead his way. Fortunately he was about 150 yards away and out of the line of fire, but close call none the less.
We start looking around and don’t see any blood and I start thinking, this isn’t good. We start looking around some more and I find him laying there about 50 yards from the last place where I saw him run. I walk up on him and say “Crap, why’d you have to be so big?” LOL! That was about 9:00 A.M. After some high 5’s and pics, I say now the real work starts. We drag him half way to the truck, and then decide to drop the guns off and bring back the hand truck. Took us over an hour to drag/pull him ¼ mile.

This is me trying to do my best Down4DaCount pose.

Weight

He had a set of dog killers on him. I haven’t measured them yet, but they were sharp.

Not a bad way to finish out a miserable season. Glad I drug my lazy butt out of bed!

Now what’s the best way to get all the meat and fat off so that I can bleach the bones? I want to mount them on a board.