''It's all about visualizing a precise target," says Timlin, who drove here with fellow Red Sox pitchers Tim Wakefield and Matt Ginter, a nonroster invitee who pitched last year for the Detroit Tigers.
''With archery, you have to visualize where you want the arrow to go," he added. ''It's the same thing with pitching. I don't look at Varitek's glove. I look inside his glove. It's a focus control. His webbing is real loose. Light will show through sometimes, or a lace. So that's a smaller area. If the kill zone on a pig is the size of a football, I aim for the laces."
Spend two hours whispering and waiting with the reliever in a hunting preserve, and one thing is for sure. He's in hog heaven.
''I enjoy being out among God's creations," he says.
Conditions are perfect: 75 degrees and sunny; no wind, no mosquitoes. Not like the time Timlin shot an 11-point buck in a raw, 40-degree rainstorm in Kansas.
Timlin faces the sinking sun, watches hawks soar, and listens to a cow moo in the distance. He occasionally sips some cool mineral water. Unlike native Florida rocker Tom Petty, who sings, ''the waiting is the hardest part," Timlin enjoys the downtime.
''This is what I do to unwind."
Wingshooters Hunters Preserve is a 4,000-acre site in LaBelle, halfway between Fort Myers on the west coast and Lake Okeechobee in the center of the state. It's an area so remote that the neighboring road is a dead end where locals like to target shoot at their old television sets and appliances. ''It's redneck territory," says Timlin.
Timlin thinks hunters have gotten a black eye since Vice President Dick Cheney shot his friend while quail hunting last month. ''That was an accident," says Timlin, a Bush-Cheney supporter who hails from the president's childhood home of Midland, Texas.
Timlin says being a hunter is not an issue in liberal Massachusetts. ''Nobody has said anything to me. Nothing. I don't feel like I have to defend myself because I enjoy it."
As for the hog? ''Don't worry about them, they breed like rabbits."
Experts say there is a feral pig explosion in Florida, with a population of half a million, second only to Texas.
