Under a latticework of stars, a caravan of hunters armed with purpose eased their trucks onto a quiet tract of farmland just north of Starkville city limits Tuesday night.
Over the course of the evening, hunting guides Dennis Daniels, Steven Carmichael and Mitchell Daugherty took Navarre, Florida, couple Nathan and Jennifer Nelson on a hog hunting excursion arranged especially for them. They ended the hunt with a hog on the ground and plenty of stories to tell.
Since 2014, Daniels has invited hunters like Nathan to Oktibbeha County through Heroes Hunting Hogs, a nonprofit designed to provide hunting experiences to veterans wounded in combat.
Daniels said he created the program to help his brothers-in-arms cope with life after service. A veteran himself who was wounded in Iraq in 2005, Daniels said he shares a common language and relates to the experiences of those he hosts, putting them at ease and allowing them to enjoy themselves.
“Every one of them has readily opened up and shared their stories — that’s not typical of a veteran to do with just anybody,” he said.
Nathan Nelson, who served as an Air Force intelligence officer, was paralyzed in 2013 from a combat injury in Afghanistan. He said before the injury that confined him to a wheelchair, he taught his wife to shoot. Since then, he and Jennifer have shared a passion for hunting.
For Nathan, Heroes Hunting Hogs was a unique way to spend quality time with the love of his life, he said.
“Before my injury, [I’d] always think, ‘We’ll push off doing X, Y or Z because there’s always going to be time,'” he said. “And after going through a catastrophic injury like that, we almost ran out of time, so we try to do all the lifelong memory making trips we can just on account of that.”
Jennifer said she and Nathan try to take a trip together once a month, and have hunted a variety of game together.
“This is our first hog,” she said. “We’ve gotten him out on a fishing boat red snapper fishing, which was super fun. But wheelchairs and boats don’t really mix well, so we only went on one excursion.”
The program
Daniels said when he started Heroes Hunting Hogs, he was looking for a way to serve his fellow veterans and found the answer in a problem Oktibbeha farms have struggled with for decades.
“In the 1960s, one of the landowners out here thought it would be a fun idea to import Russian wild boars, turn them loose on his property and allow his friends to go out and hunt them,” Daniels said. “I don’t think they hunted them to the extent that they needed to hunt them. Since then, they’ve just exploded in population.”
Now the hogs wreak havoc on local crops each year. Last year, the farmers who tend the hunting site lost $20,000 in seeds to the pigs in a single day, Daniels said.
“They planted a line of crops, and the hogs came out right behind the machine that night, and they just followed exactly down the furrow where that seed was planted and ate it all up,” he said.
Daniels has hosted as many as 40 veterans for Heroes Hunting Hogs, with interest spread mostly word-of-mouth by past participants. The organization, he said, uses donations to feed and house veterans and buy ammunition. A recent fundraiser brought $16,000 to buy a new handicapped-accessible ATV, Daniels added.
The organization either purchases other necessary equipment for hunts or obtains it on loan from sponsoring manufacturers.
With the support of site’s landowner, Daniels said, Heroes Hunting Hogs will continue to curb the nuisance population and give his fellow veterans a recreational therapy experience they can cherish.
“You get them out there, and they kind of open up and blossom, start smiling and joking,” he said. “You’ll quickly see that they’re comfortable with life again and what’s going on around them.”
The hunt
Over the course of Tuesday evening and into Wednesday morning, the hunters traced the property’s three-mile stretch of roads in ATVs, looking through thermal scopes for white silhouettes indicative of body heat.
The party began the hunt a few feet from the trucks when Jennifer spotted a white speck on the horizon while sitting in the still-parked ATV.
Daugherty identified the dot as “a massive boar” he estimated to be 200 pounds.
“God bless, that’s a big pig,” Carmichael said, clocking its distance at about 200 yards.
This hog, however, was the first of many to escape the party by bolting to the safety of the tree line. The hunters spotted more than 20 pigs as they drove the site’s three-mile stretch of roads, losing them each time to the trees.
Still without a quarry four hours later, the party was tired and resolved to end the hunt when Daniels stopped to survey the land a final time. He spotted two pigs standing among the corn stalks 100 yards from the vehicle.
Though Nathan was prepared to shoot, Daniels couldn’t sneak him and the ATV in range through the shin-high corn. So, armed with an AR-15 provided by her hosts, Jennifer stalked into the field with Carmichael and Daugherty.
Watching his wife through his scope, Nathan whispered words of encouragement as Jennifer inched toward the hog.
After minutes of slow progress, Jennifer kneeled and claimed her kill with a flurry of shots.
As the ATV crossed the field toward his wife and their kill, Nathan smiled with pride.
“You don’t have to be the one to shoot him to share in the experience,” he said.
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