"The hog is the poor man's grizzly," said Tommy Stroud, 45, one of Paddock's riflemen. "If you shoot at a hog, you'd better shoot straight, because if you don't kill it, he might try and kill you."
Still, despite an increase in part-time swine hunters like Paddock -- and a thriving culture of trappers who earn thousands sating gourmet appetites for wild boar in the United States and Europe -- the consensus among scholars and government officials is that the hogs are winning.
Federal agriculture officials have resorted to gunning down pigs from helicopters. State officials have declared open season on them: Hunters can shoot as many as they want, any time. Here in Van Zandt County (pop. 48,140), leaders put out a bounty four years ago, promising $7 for every pair of hog ears brought in. They got more than 2,000 and ended the offer a year later.
Experts say there is a simple reason for the expanding number of boars: They are smarter than people think. As one meat buyer put it, "Ain't nothing easy about trying to outsmart a pig."
Paddock was painfully learning that lesson once again. This night, he scoured the ranch for signs of porcine life and saw them everywhere: cloven hoofprints on the shore of a pond, hair bristles on tree trunks where fat hogs scratched themselves, and full body prints on puddles where they wallowed in the mud.
But as he slunk along the bottomlands, beneath a black, moonless sky, the sole sound Paddock heard was the soft thump of acorns falling. There were no hogs in sight.
"It's going to be a long night," Paddock said, and crept on.
Hernando de Soto, the Spanish conquistador, brought the first pigs from Europe to what is now the mainland United States in 1539. Some later ran loose after escaping their colonial masters. But it was not until the 1930s, when sportsmen began releasing Russian boars into the wild, that the true trouble started in Texas.
The hunters underestimated the boars' intelligence, as well as their rabbit-like reproductive tendencies. Soon the mongrel offspring of fierce Russian boars and fat domesticated pigs were as common in Texas as mesquite.
Officials in Oregon and Kansas still believe they can eradicate wild pigs. But in Texas, it's too late. The only hope, according to those who study the problem, is to contain the destruction they wreak when rooting up fields in search of grubs, and the diseases they spread to livestock and house pets.
