HOG HUNTING FOREVER
My Hog Discovery
 EDITOR'S
NOTE: The Chickasawhay River swamp in Greene County,
Mississippi, may have one of the oldest populations
of feral pigs in the nation. The area has no record
of a time when this river-bottom swamp hasn't homed
hogs. Fences and property lines never have bound the
free spirits of these feral hogs like the wild boars
of old. They roam at will, foraging for food, hiding
out in the big cane thickets and briar patches along
the edges of the river bank and wreaking havoc on croplands
by night. Hunters with packs of hounds and live traps
and sportsmen with rifles and bows never have eliminated
these free-roaming pigs. They have become as much a
part of the land as the earth itself.
 "Although
we harvest about 20 hogs per year, the biggest hog we've
ever taken weighed around 300 pounds," Taylor mentioned.
"The hogs' numbers never seem to dwindle. But we
don't hunt them every day -- usually just on weekends
during archery season. However, we can hunt hogs all
year in Mississippi, and we have no limit on the number
we can take. Although many farmers would like the hogs
wiped out because of the crops they destroy, my family
thinks the hogs are heirs to the land as much as we
are." We returned to the camp, gutted the hogs
and hung them in the cooler. The next morning, we skinned
and butchered them before I left camp.
 As
soon as I arrived home, an unknown force seemed to guide
me to take the meat to a friend who owned a barbecue
restaurant and ask him to roast the pig over the flames
in the open pit where he generally cooked his meat in
the same ancient way people cooked hogs many years ago,
before they had electricity and modern cooking devices.
I experienced some strange emotions again when I arrived
home and walked up the steps to my bedroom. As I looked
to my left, I saw the Phillips' family coat of arms
hanging in our hallway. I'd passed that wall plaque
many times but never really studied it. Many families
have coats of arms, and some families have researched
their histories and genealogies carefully. But a friend
had given me the Phillips' family coat of arms as a
Christmas present. I'd simply hung it on the wall, not
giving it much thought. When I looked at my coat-of-arms
plaque, I saw a black boar's head above the shield.
The shield had four sections with the first and fourth
panels bearing three boars' heads each. Panels two and
three each had a cross with four V-shaped objects known
as pheons or broadheads on them.
 Now
everything I had felt on the day of my hog hunt made
sense. Apparently, my family came from an ancient lineage
of Welshmen who hunted hogs with swift bows and sharp
broadheads for centuries. The Phillips' family immortalized
this form of food gathering on their coat of arms for
all to see and for future generations to understand
the importance to the family's of taking wild swine
with swift shafts. I believe when I drew my bow on that
young black boar, I relived the hunt of another Phillips
in a time and place when his family's survival depended
on successful boar hunting with a bow and arrow. When
I released the arrow to take the hog, my spirit rode
the shaft with my kinsman's whose very existence depended
on his taking a wild boar. Bowhunting wild hogs now
is more than a sport to me. It provides a link for me
with my ancestors and a re-association with a family
tradition and way of hunting so important to my family
that my Welsh forefathers preserved it forever on our
coat of arms. I was born to hunt hogs with a bow.
TOMORROW: WHAT ABOUT HOGS
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