I had just come back from the service in 1954. My wife was expecting our first baby, and I was running a general store on Highway 97 just outside of Bainbridge, Georgia. Hardly a day went by that someone didn’t come in and tell tales of Old Ripper.
Old Ripper was a large black wild hog that lived in the nearby Fowltown Swamp. That hog tore up more fences, broke more gates, broke the backs of more female hogs and was chased by more hunters than any critter there has ever been in this country. Ripper had been shot by several people. My Daddy fired at him seven times with an M-1 carbine and believed he hit him, but the hog never fell. He had been hunted with dogs and he had killed plenty of dogs. There never was a hog hound that could hold him. The last time the boar was run with hounds, he killed two of the best hounds in the county with his slashing tusks, so no one else ever put their dogs on Old Ripper.
Old Ripper got his name because there seemed to be absolutely nothing he couldn’t rip up or utterly destroy. Farmers around Bainbridge went to the hardware stores and bought brand-new aluminum gates to put in the gaps he made in their fences. Within a week, the gates were often all bent and torn up where that crazy boar had stuck his nose under and bent them to get into a pasture or field. There was no hog wire or barbed wire fence that could keep Old Ripper out.
That boar was walking destruction. The farmers hated him not only for tearing up fences and gates, but even more because of what he did to their sows. Ripper would break into a pig parlor, tear up the pens and release all the sows. Then he would take them off for a stroll in the woods. Old Ripper weighed 438 pounds. So when he mounted some of the young sows, he broke their backs. Then the sows would have to be destroyed. The sows he did breed threw shoats that were as wild and crazy as he was. The piglets wouldn’t fatten and brought almost nothing at the market.
Everybody was out to get Old Ripper. My dad was accustomed to catching wild hogs. We used to catch them in the Fowltown Swamp, fatten them and sell them at the market. My daddy knew about trapping hogs. He built traps to catch Old Ripper. On two separate occasions Old Ripper did go into one of daddy’s traps, but he tore up the wooden stockades and broke out both times. My daddy wouldn’t stand for that, so daddy got a steel bear trap and set it for Ripper. When daddy went back the next day he found the giant tracks of Old Ripper and followed them to the trap. But instead of catching a renegade hog, he found the bear trap had been sprung by the big boar.
One reason Old Ripper became a legend was his ability to outthink the farmers and the hunters in our area. He had been around humans so much that in many cases he just outthought folks instead of using brute force. The people around our place began to think Old Ripper might be a supernatural creature. He was a boar, but he was a smart boar. No dogs could hold him, no stockades could enclose him, no fence could stop him and no man had been able to kill him for seven years.
Other episodes added to the legend of Old Ripper. One of the meanest things Old Ripper ever did involved Mrs. Ella T. Hand’s daughter-in-law, who was five months pregnant. She was in her kitchen and heard a disturbance out among her sows. She went out to the pig parlor and saw Old Ripper trying to tear the planks off the posts where she had her sows penned up. She picked up a rock and threw it at the old boar to try and run him off. When he saw her, he turned, looked straight at her and charged. Only a few steps away was a giant red oak stump that stood about three feet off the ground. The lady climbed up on the stump and began to scream for her husband. All the while, Old Ripper was going around the stump, snorting and blowing. He attempted to rear up on that stump and get to her but she stayed just out of reach of his razor-sharp tusks. For an hour the hog circled the stump as the lady screamed for help. Finally her husband came home. When he saw what was happening, he grabbed his shotgun from over the fireplace and ran toward the hog. At less than 10 yards, he shot Old Ripper in the side of the head with birdshot. The hog merely shook his head, looked at the man and trotted off.
To say Old Ripper was hated by everybody in the community would be a vast understatement. Every man and boy dreamed of killing that old boar, and plenty of work was forgotten by the men who hunted him. All it took to organize a community hog hunt was for someone to report that they’d seen Old Ripper. Every man and boy within earshot would grab a gun and head for the swamp.
I would have liked to have hunted Old Ripper, but I had mouths to feed. I didn’t have time to waste on that renegade boar. I had just bought a brand-new lever-action Marlin .30/30. I was proud of that gun and took it out behind the store to test it out. On that particular day, Mrs. Ella T. Hand happened to be sitting out in front of the store. Mrs. Hand was close to 80 years old. She always wore a sunbonnet, a long dress and about 90 percent of the time, she had a dip of snuff in her mouth. Mrs. Hand saw me kill a crow sitting in the field about 150 yards away with that rifle. I knew I’d made a lucky shot, but she didn’t. She told everyone for a month about how good I could shoot with that new .30/30.
“If that old wild hog comes back around my sows, I’m going to come and get you, Jack, and let you kill him with that new rifle,” she told me.
Well, about a month later, here comes Mrs. Ella T. in her 1949 pickup truck.
“Jack, that old boar is up in my field with some sows he run off,” she told me. “Now I don’t expect you’ll have any better luck than anybody else who has tried to kill him, but I sure wish you’d bring that new rifle up to the field and give it a try.”
I closed up my little country store and got into the front seat of that pickup truck with Mrs. Ella T. to try my hand at Old Ripper. I had five cartridges with copper-jacketed lead-headed bullets in my gun—the kind that open up but still go on through. There wasn’t any doubt in my mind that if I could hit that boar, the bullets would do the damage needed to put him down.
We drove to Mrs. Hand’s 40-acre peanut field, which backed up to the edge of Fowltown Swamp. I saw Old Ripper out in the middle of the field with four sows he had just broken out from their pen. The five pigs were all rooting in the peanuts. There was a hog wire fence around the field, with barbed wire on the top. The field, which was about 250 yards wide and about twice as long, was on a hillside. Old Ripper and the sows were up close to the top of the hill and I was down near the bottom. There was a dried-up creekbed that ran under the fence. From the tracks in the wash, I figured this was where Old Ripper and the sows had gotten into the field. The creekbed was only about two or three feet deep, but it was big enough for me to crawl under the fence and still stay out of sight. I could lay down in the bottom of the wash, crawl along on my stomach and Old Ripper wouldn’t be able to see me.
Until that day, I had never seen Old Ripper. I had looked at fences he had torn up and I had seen mud on the sides of the trees where he had rubbed. I knew he was a big boar, but I never realized just how big. When I saw Old Ripper standing there in the sun, his black bristles gathered in the rays of light and made him look a deep royal blue. He was a magnificent animal standing about four feet high, and he completely dwarfed the sows following him.
I said to myself, “Doggone your hide, Old Ripper! I’m going to try and get a little closer to you.”
The wash meandered from the bottom of the slope where I was uphill to where Old Ripper was rooting in the peanut patch. Lying flat on my belly, I would crawl for 10 yards and then peep over the edge to see where Old Ripper was. Each time I looked, the old boar was about 10 yards farther from the place than he had been before. It was just like he had a sixth sense that warned him of danger. He kept the same distance away, about 230 yards from me, from the time I first saw him until I decided to shoot. After I had crawled 30 yards, Old Ripper and his band of runaway sows were within 10 yards of a thick broom sedge field. I knew that if he got into that field, I wouldn’t be able to see to shoot him.
The wash was shallower and just barely kept me out of the boar’s view. The shot had to be over 200 yards. So I laid the rifle down on the lip of the wash, looked through the open sights and aimed at the top of Old Ripper’s shoulder. When I squeezed off the first shot, I saw the dust fly off the boar’s shoulder and heard the bullet make a dull thud when it hit him, but Old Ripper showed no sign of being wounded.
Then I stood up. Old Ripper reared up on his hind legs and bellowed like a wild bull. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I had caught or killed more than 100 hogs out of that swamp, but I had never heard a hog make a sound like that.
When Old Ripper came down on his front feet, he was on a dead run, headed right down that hill. I knew that when he got to the bottom of the hill, he had business with me. I should have killed Old Ripper with that first shot, but he was far from dead. I didn’t panic. I knew that before the boar got to me, I would have time to fire four more of those .30/30 shells. I thought there was no way I wouldn’t kill him before he got to me. I had faced other wild hogs before.
With every shot, I believed I was pumping more lead into Old Ripper, but he never slowed. He still came on toward me. I took my time, aimed, squeezed, heard the report of the rifle, jacked another shell into the chamber and fired again. I knew I was hitting the boar, but he never missed a stride.
When Old Ripper was less than 50 yards away, I heard the hammer fall on an empty chamber. That was the loudest, most desperate sound I ever heard in my life.
I looked around and saw one lone cherry tree with no limbs on it about 30 yards to my right, but my feet wouldn’t work. I knew I couldn’t stay where I was, but I couldn’t go anywhere else. Old Ripper just kept on coming. I finally threw that gun down and began to run. Then I saw Old Ripper, now 20 yards away, running on two crippled front legs. I knew then that I had a chance to outrun him, but just as that idea went through my mind, the big boar fell and rolled to a stop about 10 yards away from me. He never moved, he never grunted and he never made another sound.
There was a slight breeze coming from that dead boar to me. Old Ripper’s odor was the strongest, rankest smell I ever have smelled. It was awful. I waited awhile to make sure Old Ripper was dead. Then I looked to see where my bullets had hit. The first had entered the shoulder. The second went through the hog’s loin and had gone into his stomach. Two other shots had hit his fore shoulders and entered the chest cavity. One bullet just flat-out missed.
Looking at Old Ripper, I was kind of sad that he was gone. Even if he was a renegade, he was a magnificent animal. There had never been a boar like him before that I ever heard tell of, and there never was another.
Mrs. Ella T.’s son James and her husband Ressie helped me load Old Ripper onto the pickup truck. We took the boar to Mr. Smoke Roger’s platform scales at Fayetteville, Georgia. The boar tipped the scales at 438 pounds. We struggled to reload the boar and then drove back to Bainbridge. Dr. Cooper, the veterinarian at that time, examined him. Below Ripper’s inch-thick hide was a sheath of gristle that extended from his huge shoulders to the middle of his back. This sheath had been Old Ripper’s armor and had turned the shotgun pellets and rifle bullets over the years. Dr. Cooper said the boar was between 8 and 10 years old and was probably a throwback to some of the European wild boars let loose in this country years before.
Read Next: I’ve Been Charged by Bears and Moose. Wild Hogs Are Much, Much Worse
When my daddy saw that the boar filled up the bed of that pickup truck, he could hardly believe his eyes. He had wanted to be the one who killed Old Ripper, but since he didn’t, he was glad it was me.
“That ol’ hog has cost farmers in this area thousands of dollars and many good sows, as well as being responsible for a lot of little pigs that weren’t fit to sell,” my daddy said. “I’m glad he’s gone.”
Since then the old Fowltown Swamp where Old Ripper used to roam and where wild pigs lived and bred for hundreds of years has vanished. Old Ripper’s haunts are covered by Lake Seminole today, but I remember it like it was when that boar was less than 30 yards away on a dead run bringing hurt to me, and I heard the sound of the hammer on my .30/30 falling on an empty chamber.