I wish I had autopsied the body...unfortunately we didn't do that in those days. But obviously the damage was extensive...a lot of twitching muscles and jerking spasms told of massive nerve damage.

Later that year I shot a big bag of meat called a Eland with a military auto 45 acp...twice. We had found a village that had no males in it, no men old or young. The women, young and old, were starving. So we chased this Eland....in a English type military jeep. When my driver got us up beside it, I shot it behind the rib cage angling towards the chest. Two hard ball rounds. He went down after a long run. And we dragged him back to the village. Those women sure knew what to do with him. We then notified the authorities about the problem we found, and where the village was.

That's one of the beauties of the 45 caliber...they penetrate. Using 18 to 18.5 grains of 2400 under the Keith shaped 45/255 grain SWC in 45 long Colt single actions, I hunted everything in the U.S. south east. Deer...we lived in the wilderness of the south east for five years, it was heavily treed land...I took fork horns and dry does for meat. The whitetails in the area were small, but plentiful. We would get sixty to seventy pounds of eating meat out of them. So for a family of three meat eaters...I harvested a lot of deer with that load....

Black bear...if you have black berries growing on your wilderness property, it will bring in black bears. I filled my bear tag every year, and used the 45 Colt and Keith load often.

Turkeys....the neat thing about the load is it kills turkeys quickly and without ripping them up. We had turkeys all over the area. The state prisons in Virginia in those years used to raise turkey for release...to get the state restocked in this wonderful game bird. He might be all dark meat, but cooked right in a oven bag, makes a tasty meal for three or more people.

Back in the 1930s many of the farms that went under during the depression, released their pigs into the wild so the banks wouldn’t take them. The pig is a premier intelligent animal. And much like wild boar...except in color...they grow big. Not being indigenous to the state at the time they didn't come under the hunting regulations. I kept a lot of families supplied with rich in protein, feral pig meat. I hunted for a number of folks in the area that for one reason or another didn’t hunt.

The first feral pig I took was interesting, it was in the spring of 1970. My wife and I spent a long and warm, early spring afternoon putting in a big garden. I made it to the bath tub first after the digging, planting, hoeing was over. While luxuriating in the deep suds...wife comes in and announced that something large is in our new garden munching...on the new tomato plants. Dress in soap suds and a Ruger SA I tromped to the back porch and shot it's big form...it set up such a squealing I shot it again...this time where I thought the head was.

My neighbor came over when I called him and explained that I though I killed someone’s pig. It of course turned out feral...and it weighed in at just over 400 lbs..the largest I ever took then or since, including Russian boar on game ranches. The tusks were 5 inches and 5 and 1/4 inches. The surprise is.... it was a female. My neighbor was the head vetinarian for the state prison system. He said he had never seen a feral female grow so large. But a very tasty female she was.

These were the main eating animals nature provided for us and our neighbors. Then there always were tasty treats like squirrels...and when we first moved out into the wilds I bought large numbers of heavy body meat type rabbits from Sears Farm Supplies and released them into our area. In a few years were had them everywhere. Some of the hares would go well over 10 to 15 lbs. And they got just as smart and woods wise as there wild relatives.

The folks around me caught the bug about giving back to nature, and soon we were releasing different varieties of hares, squirrels...tried pheasant...but they all migrated to Maryland were it was colder. I got tired of doing for chickens...so I put out chicken wire around a three acre patch of not so wooded land and released them into it. We had a number of pull downs and brush piles in there....we would put out feed but in different areas of the patch, and a lot less of it then we were feeding them before. And they thrived much better. We let them scratch for a living. Finding eggs was a problem until I hired two kids from a nearby farm to do it...they got half the egg money from the country grocery store we sold the eggs to.

Our culling of the fork horns and the dry does built a deer herd around us, that was second to none for healthy and big horned bucks.

And then there were the pests and vermin and varmints. I've written about wild dogs before. In 1984 when I was writing my book on leveraction rifles. One of the U.S.Wildlife services sent us figures on animal populations. They estimated that at that time outside of cities, there were at least 15,000,000 feral dogs. The southern states at the time used dogs to hunt with, and that added to the problem in our areas. In one three year period I kept records on the ones I killed...99 went down just in our little area. About ten square miles...And as their population went down, the small game populations along with the deer exploded.

Coyotes were just beginning to infiltrate our area in the 1970s. But they came on fast. Old friends still back there tell me now that the feral dogs and the 'oytes have interbred for a super smart wild K-9.

Most time I left racoons alone as they are wonderful animals to watch. Unless they got to raiding our farm animals...like chickens. My...my, did some of those boys like chickens. Yet some of them we got to recognize because they came and went often, and never went near the farm animals...especially fowl. They raided the garbage, but that didn't bother me. They also gave a lot...the rat population was kept down by them, I don’t think they ate the rats...I’m not sure...but they sure killed them. Something my lazy cats wouldn’t do.

We had a big cat..he looked like a large football on short legs. He was named after his color, Smokey. Poor thing, he was given a big body and lots of strength but no brains. My wife and I were watching from our picture windows one night...we had a red security light that animals couldn’t really see, red being out of the spectrum of their vison...there was a racoon we knew on top of one of our garbage cans. He was neatly removing just the choice tid-bits he wanted. Well here comes Smokey down our long lumber road. He spies this racoon on the cans...since Smokey couldn't remember yesterday, let alone a racoon that had the run of the place. He decided it was his duty to rid our property of this interloper.

Some where from the road to the top of those garbage cans, things went awry for poor Smokey. He jumped up beside the racoon, which was larger then Smokey by half more. The cat did his hissing and bent back routine in the racoon's face...the ol'coon reached over almost casually, grabbed the cat’s tail and bit the end off of it...clean as a whistle. Smokey screamed bloody murder and went directly to the top of a thirty some foot high oak tree. Just loudly screaming to the world of the indignity he suffered. The coon went back to his eating and we nearly died of laughter.

But that wasn't the end of it all..Smokey stayed in the tree all night long. The next morning we were trying to couch him back down. But he didn't know how to go down a tree, just up. Because of the depth of the intellectual exercise it takes to go backwards was too much for him, I guess. Also being tired, his claws suddenly slipped with his butt pointing down the trunk, the claws became like zippers opening the bark of the oak, and he came down at a healthy speed for even for a Chevy. Landing directly on his ass, and of course that's where the boy's brains were all along. It didn't help his future intellectual status at all.

We had a hawk that was very smart suddenly show up. This guy liked ducks, and he was too good at it. So all the neighbors and I tried to nail his thieving hide..we put a bounty on him..a box of what ever ammo the one that got wanted.

I was up before light one morning, and I spotted a shadow of a big bird on top of the security light pole, down the hill from our glass sliding doors at the back of our house. The red light was very dull and shining down so all I could make out in the dark was the shape of a large bird...but I knew it had to be the hawk....waiting for light so he could hit our free ranging chickens no doubt.

Using a rifle with a silent load, and excellent scope..I put the shape in the middle of the scope and squeezed it off. I could hear the satisfying sound of branches snapping as he fell down thru the trees and a solid thud to the forest floor. We had breakfast and at first light I went out to collect my prize. Image my surprise when it wasn't the hawk...but our rooster!

That’s OK, I never liked that rooster anyway..loud mouth. He was as tough eating as he was loud. Some one else got the hawk weeks later.

Cats were constantly being left on our country roads by city people who didn’t want them anymore....the poor things would sit for days waiting for their owners to return. The ones that survived became killing machines on small animals...wild and farm animals.....and the proliferated like crazy. Lucky they didn’t get as large as dogs, they would have been twice as dangerous. Vultures don’t always wait till something dies, that’s a fairytale....and Virginia’s law prohibited killing them. So were everywhere and cars on country roads were constantly hitting them. The damage to a car could be extensive, they are big birds. Like any wild animal that’s totally protected, they grow out of control. Luckily the state law stated anything that was destroying your property could be killed.

I’m not sure if you know how vultures defend themselves...they vomit on their enemies. If you ever had a dog or a cat come home after getting hit by a vulture...they would be on your hit list like they were on mine. I had one cat half blinded, and with bald spots....So any that came in on my property were quickly dispatched. But they did serve a good use also. One small feral dog I shot in an open field one day was completely gone by sundown...vultures. We called them the Southern States Sanitation System.

I was putting in fence posts one morning, my oldest daughter was a little girl at the time. She said ‘Daddy look at the big dog behind you...’

It was an old, half blind female black bear...she was walking down the road towards us...unawhere that we were even close. I took the hole shovel I had and when she came too close I gave her my best Willy Mays baseball swing...and bopped her in the head. She sat back like a big dog and shook her head...got up turned around and went in the opposite direction from us.