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

dozen at one go later in the night.
    We hunted on foot for hours, slowly circling the farm several times. After a while we decided to try another tactic, to cover more ground.
    Daniel started his pickup truck with Bob in the cab and me in the bed. He drove out to another farm that he had access to and started driving up and down the access roads. We cruised through enormous fields with massive irrigation systems. I stood up and leaned forward over the back of the cab with the rifle on my shoulder, elbow resting on the roof as I bounced with every rock and bump in the dirt road. The gray-and-white moonlight spectacle of fields and woods flew past as I scanned the tree line with the night-vision scope. I wondered if this was what it was like to be in the Taliban.
    We stopped at the end of a long field in front of a gate for which Daniel didn’t have the key. As the three of us discussed where to go next, I spied a sizable group of pigs in the next field, on the other side of the gate. There were so many of them, I scarcely believed that this could really be a herd of wild animals. But it was. Thirty or forty pigs all eating in the middle of the field, no more than a hundred and fifty yards away.
    With any of my own bolt-action deer rifles, this would have been a simple business. Using a steady rest, I could pick off at least three of them before they were gone. But I wasn’t hunting with a deer rifle. I was hunting with an AR-15 that I’d met just that night and shot only at fifty yards. The scope was mounted so high off the barrel that a tremendous amount of holdover would be required for a shot at that distance, as opposed to the fifty yards we’d zeroed the scope at.
    Daniel and I whispered in rapid consultation. We had to get closer. The wind was in our favor, at least for the moment. We decided to make an approach from around the tree line at the edge of the field in which the pigs stood.
    Bob stayed back at the truck as Daniel and I moved out. We couldn’t see the pigs during the first stage of our approach, but we knew where they were likely to be. The moon had sunk out of sight and we dared not turn on flashlights, which would give away our position. We navigated using the trick of looking away from what we really needed to see, shifting our attention to our peripheral vision, which has superior night vision to that of the center of the eye.
    This was fine adventure now. The thick Georgia night air was in my nostrils. I felt good and whole and alive as I sneaked up on feral pigs in the dark of night.
    When we’d gotten to the point in the tree line that should have put us about thirty yards from the pigs, they weren’t there. The herd was on the move, steadily grazing its way down the field. The pigs didn’t seem spooked and probably had no idea we were there, but we weren’t much closer to them than when we had started.
    Faster, we moved down the tree line in pursuit. I saw the leaders of the herd heading straight toward the opening of a trail into the woods on the other side of the long field. The herd was still some hundred and fifty yards away, but this was as good as it was going to get before they were all gone.
    I dropped to one knee and brought the heavy beast of a rifle up to my shoulder, resting my left elbow on my knee to steady my aim. My right thumb disengaged the unfamiliar safety switch. I found a pig that wasn’t moving at the moment, aimed the low-magnification scope just behind the ear, and opened fire.
    All hell broke loose among the pigs. The gun smoke momentarily obscured my vision through the sensitive night-vision scope. The herd broke into two; some headed straight for the woods, and others ran to the opposite side of the field. One pig, probably the one I had aimed for, was standing still. I fired again, three or four times, peppering both that pig and others near it. And suddenly, with a whole damned herd of feral swine on the move in front of me, the gun jammed.
    Have I mentioned how