All Aquiver Over One Last Hunt

Dawn breaks softly on the mustard-covered hills over Scorpion Ranch, the historic canyon compound from where generations have run sheep and which now will become a National Park Service headquarters.

From the sheer ocean cliffs of Cavern Point above the ranch, the eastern sun rises through the clouds to outline Summit Peak on West Anacapa Island just a few miles away.

Prowling early, reddish-gray foxes the size of large house cats work their cliff-side trails for bird eggs and beetles--then playfully chase each other over yellow-flowered pastures.

On the high hills on both sides of Scorpion, large rams peacefully lead rows of sheep on ridgelines as baby lambs scamper to catch up.

But hunters who have come one last time before their sport is banned from the island are rousing too, in the old adobe ranch house at the mouth of Scorpion Canyon.

Kim Cummings, himself an owner of a 5,000-acre hunting ranch in the Tehachapis, has made coffee in a black iron pot and is pouring for other guests, who are dressed in green and brown camouflage and who will soon take to the ridges and canyons with bows and arrows to shoot one last wild sheep or feral pig.

Jim Dervin, 39, and his 12-year-old son, Robin, are two of the hunters.

They had driven all night from their house in Humboldt County for a final visit with their friends, Scorpion Ranch caretakers Susan Manchester and Dave Mills, and expert pig hunter Rick Berg, who tends vineyards in Sonoma County when he isn’t helping out on the island.

“We’re out here to try to get Rob a pig before the hunts are over,” said Dervin, a tree-trimmer who has hunted wild animals and raised their young as pets nearly all his life.

“But it’s not about the killing,” he said. “It’s about getting out in the hills. You see nature. It’s like spring out here. The animals are pairing up. And there are lots of new birds out here that we don’t see anywhere else. Last time, we saw a peregrine falcon with an island scrub jay in its beak.”

Freckled-faced and red-haired, young Robin said the island is “really cool.”

“I like seeing all the animals, the sheep and the pigs,” he said. “I like it up the creeks. There’s lots of caves with shell middens, piles of shells from the Chumash.”

After breakfast, the Dervins and Berg and his mixed-breed Rottweiler, Boone, head up Scorpion Canyon to the hills. They are armed with high-tech composite bows and an attached quiver of arrows that cost $10 each.

Not far from camp, they come upon their first sheep of the day, a smelly ram’s carcass left to rot after its trophy head was cut off.

That isn’t their kind of hunting, the men say, insisting that most sheep killed on the island are skinned and dressed and their meat taken home to eat.

Up a nearby hillside, a flock of sheep wanders well beyond range for a clean shot.

“Bowhunting to me is getting close to the animal, seeing their eyes,” Dervin said. Once a prized sheep is spotted, he can spend an hour and a half creeping below view in a half circle to get close, Dervin said.

But on this day the hunters are in search of “pig motels,” rugged side canyons and bushy thickets where the 150-pound tusked critters can be rousted.

For an hour, the hunters climb like goats, scaling one rocky hillside after another, sending Boone out to sniff for pigs and flush them out. But no luck. Only a couple of hundred wild pigs remain on the 6,300-acre Gherini sheep ranch, and they are nowhere to be seen.

Finally, at the foot of a steep canyon, beneath 1,581-foot Red Mountain, the hunters see the fresh 6-inch-deep ruts in the moist soil that are sure signs that pigs are near.

Berg surveys the canyon. It’s still winter, but on both sides of a fast-running creek are the signs of spring.

Toyon bushes are loaded with red berries. White blooms cover wild cucumber plants with boulder-sized root balls. There are ferns and mosses along pools, cliff-hugging succulents and island oaks and rare ironwood trees near the top.

“Look at this canyon,” Berg said. “This is what I’m going to miss the most. It looks like some manicured Japanese garden.”

Dervin--an amateur botanist who knows the name of nearly every plant and animal he comes across--said he understands what park officials are talking about when they say 2,500 wild sheep are destroying the old east end sheep ranch.

“You can see there on the most sheer cliffs so many types of flowers that the sheep can’t reach,” he said. “This is the parched end of the island, the sheep ranch. You get on the other side of the ridge [in the Nature Conservancy preserve] and it’s like Africa. They have a pine forest.”

Ascending the canyon on a sheer rock climb, the hunters see fresh signs of pig.

“You get that kind of sweet acorny smell,” Berg said. “That’s the pig.”

Berg, whose nickname is “Pig,” has been hunting the island for 12 years, and he knows the critters, even speaking their language with a variety of calls. He admires their forcefulness, the ability of even five-pound piglets to force a man’s hand upward with the strength of their necks.

The hunters top the east island’s highest ridge, finding pig beds, but no pigs.

“I just hope we see one,” Dervin said. “It would be cool.”

But first, they hunker down for lunch and talk of the Chumash, whose inland caves and white shell middens are everywhere.

“They lived on one side of the canyon in winter and the other side in summer,” Dervin said. “I look at this and it’s just heaven. People pay to retreat to a Buddhist camp or to a monastery, but this is what it’s about for me.”

The hunters never did find a pig.