It was becoming the norm for me, loading the dogs onto the ute and doing the ten minute drive up the road. In the end it took eight months and a lot of mucking around at all hours of the night. But this one particular night made it all worth while with a solid Rimutaka boar with a good jaw.
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We had him coming into the dump and would get consistant times, but he was always one step ahead of us. Sometimes a matter of seconds from when he departed until the dogs showed up on the camera. Some nights he wouldn't come in at all, like he had a six sense that we were coming. We tried windy nights to hide the sound of our approach, still nights to get the dogs the perfect wind, different wind directions, coming in from different directions, pretty much anything we could think of to get an advantage over him. But in the end it was the easiest approach that was successful.
This night was a Saturday night so we cooked some dinner and had a couple of beers and slowly got ready to do what we had done so many times before. We drove a short distance and started walking the track to the dump with the dogs let off. Quite often we would have the dogs tied up until we got close to the dump, but we decided not to this time.
The dogs hit the dump and carried on past it. We knew they weren't chasing anything, just working at nose down tracking speed. It wasn't long before we heard a bark and then a scrap, so we started making our way there. It took close to half an hour to get there, pushing through the thick Rimutaka bush. We made it there and stuck it and checked the dogs. Just one skin rip was all, so we were lucky. He went 150lb with a solid jaw typical of the Rimutaka pigs.
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Even with modern technology like the cameras which are a great tool, it just goes to show that it is still a battle of the cunning of the dog vs the cunning of the pig and how clever these older pigs get.
