Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species by Jackson Landers Read Free Book Online Page A

is a semiautomatic rifle that was the basis for the better-known M-16 assault rifle used by the U.S. military. Most ARs and M-16s shoot the .223 Winchester cartridge, which is small enough to be illegal in most states to use on deer. It doesn’t have enough oomph to do the job reliably.
    Most of my hunting experience has been with bolt-action rifles, so the AR felt alien in my hands — heavy and awkward. For someone who spent a few tours of duty carrying a similar weapon in Iraq or Afghanistan, this thing would probably feel perfect. In fact, I know several veterans who have come home from months or years of combat patrol duty and find that their hands and eyes mesh with the workings of an AR more naturally than with any other shooting platform. To me, it felt like shouldering a weed whacker. I wished that I could hunt with one of the deer rifles I’d brought along, but the night-vision scope, which trumped all else, happened to be attached to the AR.
    The pigs around Perry are mostly nocturnal. Fortunately, Georgia allows pigs to be hunted at night. In the daylight, you might stumble across one every now and then, but it’s not something you can count on. Even in a full moon, it isn’t easy to see — and clearly identify — a pig through an ordinary rifle scope. This meant that we would be depending heavily on the night-vision scope.
    We started out on foot, working our way around a farm of more than six hundred acres, where Daniel regularly hunts. I am accustomed to checking the wind right away when I start hunting, but Daniel pointed out that when hunting at night, we’d have to keep checking the moon as well. Not only did we need to hunt into or crosswise to the wind in order to keep the pigs from scenting us, but we also needed to avoid having the newly risen moon directly behind us, so that we wouldn’t be silhouetted. This was a whole new world of hunting for me.
    The world around us was all grays and blacks and whites in the moonlight, which brightened the trees and the sky and the scattered ramshackle farm buildings. We walked single file: Daniel in front, I in the middle, then Bob. In the dim light of a cloudy moon, we couldn’t always see if there was something we could trip over or crunch down on and make an unfortunately loud noise.
    “Walk like a cowboy,” Daniel instructed.
    It was good advice. The fabric of our clothing could also make a noise when we walked with our legs too close together. Walking like a cowboy, with our legs apart and stepping high, we moved more quietly.
    We walked a few miles like this in the dark, stopping every so often to scan the fields and pastures for pigs. We crossed over a fence and walked around a small pond, when Daniel and Bob saw, practically simultaneously, a pig-sized black blob. At about fifty yards away, I had an easy shot. I shouldered the AR and lined up the scope. With the night vision, I could see that this was definitely the correct prey.
    “You want me to shoot now?” I whispered to Daniel.
    “No, wait.”
    I didn’t have the slightest idea why, but this was Daniel’s show and I figured he knew what he was doing, or I wouldn’t have been there in the first place. I watched through the scope with an itchy trigger finger as the pig trotted away across the field. It crossed the path we had taken, sniffed the ground, and took off toward the woods.
    “Why’d you have me hold back?”
    “Because that was just the one pig,” Daniel said, as if I’d asked something ridiculous. “As soon as we fire a shot, every pig around here is going to disappear for the next four or five hours. You shoot just the one and you aren’t gonna get any more.”
    Daniel was right, in terms of what he was trying to accomplish. I had come to Georgia mostly just wanting to knock out a pig to cook and write about. But Daniel’s job as a steward of that land is to remove as many pigs as possible. Sometimes that means passing on the one easy pig in hopes of killing half a