Good Hunting.

They may talk of their deer-stalking and its spell for the hunter, but there is considerably more excitement for the sportsman in the chase of the wild boar. Witness an episode in the Taranaki bush the other day, on the head waters of the Patea River, when the quarry of a party of settlers was a big porker which, when killed, was found to be nine feet long and weighed nearly a quarter of a ton. That monster, which it took many bullets to kill, was a veritable king of the wilds.

The strenuous exercise and thrill at the end of it, with always the chance of a nasty mishap, there is nothing in these parts to page 42 equal a brisk pig hunt in the fern hills or the bush.

On one long-ago backblocks tramp we were in the heart of the great forest that then extended for nearly a hundred miles between where the North Island Main Trunk railway now goes and the Taranaki outsettlement of Stratford. Our Maori companion, with his two pig-dogs started a pig-hunt in the thick timber alongside a creek. The boar was brought to bay against a big rimu tree, and he took the aggressive, charging each of us in turn. One of the party just escaped a jab from the tusker by shinning up a slender ponga fern tree. It broke with his weight, when he was yelling advice to one of his mates, and the next moment the tree and occupant were down on top of the old boar and the two pig-dogs. One of the dogs had the grunter by an ear, the other was attacking him in the rear, and the merry hunters were dodging about trying to get a shot or a whack at him with an axe. The row we all made in that bush may be imagined.

At last one clever sportsman, aiming a blow at the pig with the axe, chopped off the poor dog's nose and part of its jaw instead of the pig's snout. We had to put it out of its misery with a shot. The other dog bolted in horror, and we saw it no more. The pig was killed, but he was such a tough old boar that he added nothing to our commissariat. The sum total was that we were deprived of two good dogs for the rest of the expedition, and the sorrowing Maori owner had to be compensated. We certainly had all the excitement we craved that day.