Gabriel Smedley's Animal Time

Hunter

It was October 12, 2020. The trees were bare of any leaves and the sunlight blanketed the ground and the trees casted their shadows. I waited in my tree stand in front of a small clearing near my cabin in the very hilly region of Ohio close to the Zaleski National Forest area in Hocking Hills. From the edge of the woods, the leaves were crunching, turning my head a sounder of feral hogs came into view. This was deer bow season, but hogs I can take at any time and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to get a hog today. I picked up my bow and waited for the right moment. A sow started to root closer to me, so I set my sights for her and drew my bow back. But before I could release the arrow, the sow lifted her head up to the forest edge. Her nose was moving up and her ears were held high, and suddenly, she squealed and dashed back into the woods followed by the rest. I sat there and watched, lowering my bow while shaking my head. But then I thought, “What could’ve scared a group of hogs?” as I was climbing down from my stand, I decided to walk in the direction the sow sniffed into to get an idea of what scared them. As I walked through the woods I was thinking it was either a person or a black bear that scared them, but I stopped. Something on the ground caught my eye. In the mud, I saw footprints, but these had five toes, each was somewhat separated and showed claw marks. What really caught my eye was the fact that they didn’t look like paws in that there was no space separating the toes from the pads. When I lowered my hand into one it dwarfed it. At that moment, I noticed the light began to get dimmer, and moved my head behind me, and started to shake a little, so I figured it was time to head back to the cabin.