Read Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species for Free Online

either. The refuge staff wants to examine the stomach contents and take samples. If you happen to shoot a three-hundred-pound animal two miles from the nearest road or trail, lots of luck getting it out of there. If a hunter from a neighboring zone helps you carry out your pig, he is now outside his zone and subject to arrest. State law requires that you carry your hunting license at all times while hunting, but the federal employees who manage this wildlife preserve require that all licenses be held at the desk while hunters are hunting, meaning that you’re damned either way if someone in a uniform decides he doesn’t like you. There’s more: No walking on the beach. No shooting from any vehicle or boat.
    The rules for hunting Back Bay probably give visiting hours at Folsom Prison a run for their money.
    Bob and I found ourselves in a large, garagelike building waiting to check in before dawn. A few dozen hunters milled around in mismatched camouflage and blaze orange. They were all men, of various ages. Some stood in line in front of a row of folding tables, hunting licenses and signed papers in their hands. Others clustered in front of boards that showed how many pigs and deer had been taken from each zone on different days.
    A parade of bureaucratic messes erupted between would-be hunters and the wildlife reserve employees. Hunters in their mid-sixties who had previously been told by game wardens that they were legally exempt from the requirement to present a hunter’s education certificate were turned away. Tempers flared. The Fish and Wildlife officer, a frustrated-looking man in his late thirties, tried to keep order. It quickly became clear that he didn’t know anything about Virginia’s hunting regulations. In fact, he even declared that I would not be permitted to carry a weapon into the field, on account of missing paperwork. Bob and I briefly considered heading home but decided that Bob could carry his shotgun and I’d come along, unarmed, to help out.
    The tension in the room between the hunters and the staff grew palpable as more hunters were given information that contradicted what they had been told before arriving. The Fish and Wildlife officer promised to check with a representative from the state wildlife agency about hunting regulations, and then reported back that nothing was going to change. I became curious as to who this state representative was. . . .
    Finally, they hustled us all into open-sided shuttle vehicles that resembled the parking trams at Disney World. We were driven in total darkness and dropped off at spots that may or may not have been within our proper zones.
    Bob and I stood in the middle of a gravel road as the red lights on the back of our vehicle disappeared into the distance. The ground was sodden from a recent heavy rain. We knew the dunes we needed to hunt were somewhere off to our left and that we had to get out to them before the sun came up. Pigs tend to go nocturnal when they’ve been hunted, and because hunting at night was forbidden, we needed to be in position for the first thirty minutes or so of daylight before the pigs were gone for the day. If you’ve got to hunt a nocturnal creature during the daytime, your best bet is to catch up with it at either the beginning or the end of its shift.
    Getting to the dunes seemed essential. There, we’d be able to set up on a ridge or on the side of a dune with a view commanding a wide, open area. Everywhere else, there was too much vegetation and thus no visibility.
    Our trouble was figuring out exactly how to get to where we wanted to be. In this restricted-access area, there were few hiking trails to follow. Nor had we been permitted to scout our zone in daylight before our arrival. The only thing we could do was to start walking straight for our destination and deal with whatever was in our way as best we could.
    Lots of things tend to get in your way in the coastal swamps of Virginia. We made an initial effort to hop