It’s what we do, darlin’.
The sounds of fiddle and banjo picking went late into last night, following a dinner with friends of homegrown salad, chicken and sausage gumbo, and an amazing dessert of strawberry and mint cream soup. We were gathered out back around the table, a bottle of elderberry mead making the rounds, as some of us listened and others serenaded. Somewhere between “Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Wagon Wheel,” I threw in my own entertainment by sharing the story of how I accidentally moved our 250-pound hogs.
On the farm we currently have two groups of pigs. One group of three is closing in on market weight and has six weeks to complete a life of indolence. At 100 pounds each, the other three will not be slaughtered until late in the fall. Through a combination of chance and timing, the two groups ended up together in the same paddock and pasture. The larger hogs are food bullies, and consequently, the younger ones have not grown out as fast as we would like.
Separating out hogs was long overdue and had, alas, been at the top of our to-do list for the past few weeks. Which brings us to Friday, when I stepped out onto the porch and found all six pigs in the first throes of liberty, cavorting in the side yard.
Hogs are by nature curious and cautious. They test limits, yet they are fearful of consequences. On Friday, the unlatched gate was discovered early, but, clustered and nosing around the magic line, they still took hours before gathering the courage to step across to freedom.
In the early years on the farm, I would have responded in dignified panic, running amongst them screaming and pleading and flailing my arms. Yesterday, as a seasoned warden of many such feeble escapes, I responded with calm. For pigs, like teenage boys, are both perennially rebellious and hungry. They can easily be controlled, if only just, with a full bucket of feed.
I waded through the scrum to the barn and grabbed the bucket. “Piggeee,” I called, and they came running back through the gate. All except one. The outlier barked loudly and ran the opposite direction. The rest stopped in mid-run to the food, turned, and followed suit. I tried again.
The next go ‘round I managed to get the smaller pigs through the gate, but the larger ones gamboled about among the muscadines. Figuring three pigs in a paddock beat six in the vines, I slammed the gate shut and, having doublechecked that it was indeed latched, headed off to deal with the others.
Now snuffling around the pawpaw trees, they came docilely to my calls and trotted into the large wooded paddock … their new home, where we had intended to move them all along and where they spent the remainder of the day celebrating their victory by eating last year’s acorns among the oaks.
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Reading this weekend: just received in the mail, the new American Library edition of Wendell Berry’s collected Port Williams stories and novels.
