Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/742011
his head next to his daddy's knee. The bow never made it at all. "Daddy stuffed two shells into the Fox," Gibbes recalls, "and drew a bead on the lead hog. But that sow had been in a wallow and was wearing a quarter inch of dry mud. I saw the dust fly and heard the shot rattle off her side." The sow, more annoyed than injured, set up a racket that further agitated the rest of the herd. "They kept coming for us," Gibbes said, "but every time Daddy would turn them with a blast from the twelve." They kept it up until McDowell Sr. ran out S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 201 of shells. The hogs, scalded and discouraged, retired to the swamp. The McDowells waited an hour, then gingerly climbed down. They retrieved the boar and beat a hasty retreat. McDowell Sr. never made it to the duck pond. T hat was a long time ago. Right now Gibbes McDowell is off to my right, sneaking like a Seminole. Gibbes has gone on from that first Morgan Island encounter to kill maybe 150 wild hogs with a recurve bow and handmade cedar arrows. Ask him why a recurve and he will tell you he doesn't need training wheels. Ask him about the .357 on his hip and he'll tell you stories to make you wish you never came here, never bogged in the mud with the gators and snakes and hogs. But I am here, and I hang on tightly to my Husqvarna 6.5. It's the utterly reliable Mauser 96 action parkerized the color of mud, securely bedded into a composite stock, stuffed with 160-grain round-nose slugs, and topped with a vintage Weaver V-4.5. The old Weaver may be variable, but the only variation I can see is me. The spirit is willing, the Good Books says, but the flesh is weak. My flesh—50-plus, a tad overweight, a mite deaf in one ear, blurry out of one eye— is now knee-deep in black, viscous mud.