The Good Good Pig (10 page)

To two little girls, the ruined ringlet begged for a beauty treatment.

Most animals would prefer that people leave their tails alone. Tess was one of them. She hated having her tail brushed and sat on it whenever she saw me carrying her red brush. From my earliest pony rides with my father, I had learned not to mess with a horse's back end, either, for fear of getting kicked. Even touching the tail of a snake (who you can argue
is
mostly one long tail) will usually cause the animal to turn around and face you with suspicion and then slither off.

How would our three-hundred-pound pig react to two little girls combing the tangles from his tail?

Christopher loved it.

Out of the Doll House came the perfect detangling devices: a lilac-colored brush with plastic bristles tipped with little white balls (they were intended to protect the scalp from scratches) and a dark blue comb with widely spaced teeth. Christopher particularly enjoyed it when the grooming extended to the hefty cheeks of his butt. He would often move a hind leg forward in order to show you exactly the spot that needed attention.

Occasionally, the comb would pull. Christopher would flick his tail in annoyance. If you persisted, and he didn't like it, he would pull his huge head off the ground and growl. But discomfort would be forgotten if you rubbed his belly or touched his ear and reassured him. “Good, good pig…Good, good, good.” He closed his eyes and his whole body would heave with grunts of contentment.

Tail combing was just the beginning. The girls decreed that the tail would also, of course, need to be braided. And once it got warm enough, Christopher would need a bath. We quickly learned that temperature was crucial to the success of this endeavor. Although the garden hose would have made our job easy, that wouldn't do: the water came from our well and was too cold. Chris leaped up shrieking as if we were trying to butcher him. No, instead we had to carry heavy buckets of warm, soapy water from the kitchen, and then buckets of warm water for the rinse. We had to do this while he was lying down, so the aesthetic effect of the bath was somewhat diminished: one side of him would be squeaky clean, the other side lying in soapy mud. And of course if we managed to get him to stand up and convince him to lie down again the other way so we could wash his flip side, the side we'd just cleaned got all muddy.

Soon our simple comb and brush would be augmented with other beauty products. At the Blue Seal feed store, I bought a jar of The Hoofmaker, a fragrant, creamy concoction of cocoa butter mixed with something else and guaranteeing shiny, healthy hooves for show horses. We rubbed this into Christopher's hooves till they gleamed. We bought three kinds of scrub brushes with bristles of varied stiffnesses to accommodate the varying sensitivities of Christopher's skin. (His back and rear could take vigorous brushing, but as you got closer to his head he demanded, with a growl, softer bristles.)

Pig skin is so like a person's that skin from hogs is sometimes used as a temporary graft for human victims of massive burns. (The pig skin stays on for days or weeks, as the person's own skin heals, before the graft is ultimately rejected.) So no wonder Christopher's was vulnerable to the same problems as ours: sunburn, dermatitis, eczema. Happily, pig skin responds well to human skin care products. You just have to buy huge amounts. At one point, later in Christopher's life, Howard ordered a gallon of cod liver oil (Where do you find
a gallon
of cod liver oil? At Codliveroil.com) to keep his skin supple. He drank some of it—he
liked
it—but we found it worked best rubbed directly on his skin. And many years later, when Christopher was so old that he exhibited what we called porcine pattern baldness, our vet prescribed summer baths with a special foaming antiseptic soap. We would follow this treatment with a rubdown with Vitamin E skin cream with aloe.

To some, this beauty regimen might sound over the top for a pig. But the truth is, while the brushing, bathing, tail braiding, and nipple stroking delighted Christopher Hogwood, even more it restored the humans who touched him.

 

W
ORD SPREAD
. K
ATE AND
J
ANE BEGAN TO BRING THEIR FRIENDS TO
Pig Spa. I invited professors at the grad school where I sometimes taught to bring their kids. Deacons from church came with grandchildren. The Amidons brought their grandchildren from Iowa—a place with no shortage of pigs. But they had never seen a pig like this. All the little visitors were thrilled.

But besides Kate and Jane, the kid who loved him most was Kelly Felgar.

Kelly's mom, Amy, heard about Chris at the post office, a place where you can usually count on interesting and varied conversation with your neighbors. “The topic of cantaloupe rinds came up,” Amy told me, “and then Pat Soucy mentioned saving slops for Chris. Kelly would
love
to meet Christopher! She adores pigs!”

I knew the Felgars from church, but I had never suspected their radiant, blue-eyed twelve-year-old was a pig-lover. All I knew about Kelly was that she had cancer.

The Felgars had moved to town from Athens, Georgia, when Kelly's dad became CEO of our local hospital. Back then Kelly was eight, and when she first saw the tiny elementary school on Main Street she said, “That's not a school—that's a house!” But any qualms she'd had about moving to a small, rural community were quelled on their first visit to the Friendly Farm, a modest area attraction whose motto was “See 'em, feed 'em, pet 'em.” There she fell in love with a mother pig lying on her side, nursing a row of pink piglets. She adored babies, and she loved that they were nursing (her mom, Amy, was a leader at La Leche League). And the scene reminded Kelly of the summer she and her older brother, Adam, used to play with a two-foot-long black-and-white pig named Miss Piggy who lived on her grandmother's farm.

Shortly after that, Kelly began amassing her pig collection: A pig-pile figurine carved from ivory-colored material. A pig puzzle carved from wood. Pigs of metal and plastic. Sleeping pigs and suckling pigs. A pig ballerina dancing on tiptoe (but then, pigs are always on tiptoe) clad in a pink tutu. She slept with a plushy brown pig with a squishy nose that squeaked.

Collecting pigs was just one of Kelly's hobbies; she also sang in the choir at church, won ribbons in figure skating competitions, and loved to dance. But after her diagnosis, and the brain surgery and radiation that followed, some days she didn't feel well enough to do these other things. Tending the pigs in her room was a reliable source of joy. One summer, Howard and I saw her collection when she lent it to the town library, where it commanded the glass case in the foyer reserved for rotating displays of citizens' treasures. We saw it again the next year, when it was displayed at Kelly's funeral.

But on the sunny spring afternoon that she and her mom first came to our door, Kelly felt she was the luckiest kid in the world. She was such an optimist that she often told her mom she was so lucky she had cancer and not cystic fibrosis or diabetes or Crohn's disease—she had met kids with these diseases and felt sorry for them, whereas what she had, she said, “really isn't so bad.” But on this day she felt especially blessed—for she was about to meet a famous pig.

I had already put Chris out on his tether by the time Kelly and Amy knocked at the door. With Tess and her Frisbee in tow, we approached the Plateau. Kelly couldn't believe her eyes.

“He's the biggest pig I've ever seen!”

“Want to pet him?” But I didn't really have to ask.

Over the next two years, Kelly and her mom were sporadic but enthusiastic visitors. Her parents had a photo of Chris enlarged to an eleven-by-fourteen-inch poster, which Kelly taped to her bedroom door. She told people it was “my friend Christopher, who lives up the road.”

Kelly enjoyed telling her friends about her time with him. She would tell them how he would roll over so she could scratch his belly. “No!” they would say, disbelieving.
“Yeah!”
she would counter. She told them how he would leap to his hind legs when she visited him in the barn, and he would stand taller than she was, and hold open his mouth so she could plop in banana peels and apples and pastries. She told them about the feel of his bristles, and the special, gentle greeting grunt he gave her when she visited. They were always impressed.

But unlike Kate and Jane, Kelly never wanted to bring her friends to meet him. Her mom told me: “That was just for her and Christopher.” The moments she spent with him were outside her everyday human friendships, and somehow seemed outside ordinary time. Kelly wore a knitted cap because her hair had fallen out; her cancer had spread to her spine and sometimes hurt terribly. But the cancer was far away when she came to visit Christopher Hogwood on the Pig Plateau. There was only a joyful, beaming young girl and the happiness of a great big pig.

“S
O, WHAT DO YOU THINK?”
I
SAID TO
K
ATE AND
J
ANE ONE SUMMER
afternoon at Pig Spa. I often consulted them on what I was writing and they usually gave excellent advice. “Vampire bats or sharks?”

As usual, I was working on several stories at a time. One, for
Animals
magazine, had arisen from a recent jaunt with Liz to Costa Rica, on which I'd enjoyed the distinction of being bitten by a vampire bat while I was removing the captured animal from a net. That story would report new findings that these altruistic little creatures share blood meals with hungry roost mates. The shark piece was for
International Wildlife,
the story of Jaws in reverse: human hunger for shark-fin soup was driving many sharks toward extinction. Which should I work on first?

“Vampires,” they said in unison.

“Unh,” said Christopher, as if to register an opinion. He moved a hind leg forward, asking us to scrub his butt.

It was one of those perfect, golden days on the cusp of September, when the late summer light spills over the land like cricket song, and the fields are bright with goldenrod. The hens bustled around us, hunting bugs and exclaiming softly; Tess guarded us from her position at the edge of the tall grass.

We poured another cupful of warm rinse water over Chris. “I might be a biologist when I grow up,” Jane said.

“Really?”

“Or maybe an artist,” she said. “Or maybe I would want to travel and write.” She paused. “Like you.”

“When
I
grow up,” Kate announced, “I'm going to start an animal sanctuary.” She had clearly given the idea quite a bit of thought. “All the unwanted animals can come and stay with me. It would be like here, like us with Chris and Tess and everybody, but we would have elephants, too. And wolves. And horses. And kids could come take care of them, kids who were runaways or homeless or having problems—”

“Unh-h-h-h-h-h-h!” said Christopher. The water was getting a tad too cool.

I could not help but think of Kelly then, forever fourteen. How grateful I was to have known her, and to keep her always in my memory. And how grateful I was for these girls with me now. I was grateful for their future, for the many bright dreams from which they would one day choose.

Like them, I, too, loved to imagine: my mind wandered the continents and paged through the unwritten books of tomorrow.

But that day, I was in no rush.

C
HAPTER 7

Nature Red in Claw and Tusk

H
OWARD WAS UPSTAIRS WITH
H
ARRY
A
TWOOD, SOARING OVER
Lake Erie in a flying boat in 1913. I was downstairs, gliding beneath the Pacific with hammerhead sharks over undersea mountains, sensing the earth's magnetic field as their guide.

But our written worlds vanished in an instant—casualties of another animal interruption. This time, it was the distress squawk of a chicken.

Not every squawk demanded our attention. Maybe somebody stole someone else's worm; a squabble erupted over nesting box space; a hen took offense at an undeserved peck. But sometimes squawks signaled another pig breakout. In an effort to steal the hens' grain, the coop was often the first stop on Christopher's outings—the story of which we read clearly in his hoofprints in mud or snow.

Had Christopher escaped again? Only a couple of weeks earlier, Lilla and the girls had been getting ready for school when they saw him loose in their backyard, cheerfully flipping dinner-plate-sized divots of lawn into the air with his nose. Jane tried to lure him back to his pen with her peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but after he ate that, plus her apple, he took off down Route 137. His ultimate capture even involved our town road agent, so within days, the whole town had known our pig had been loose again.

We didn't want a replay of this soon.

Howard ran to look out the upstairs bathroom window, hoping not to see a black-and-white spotted pig crossing the street. Instead, he saw a hen racing uncharacteristically across the road.

Howard wondered: why did the chicken cross the road?

And then he saw, chasing the hen, something long and orange. Fox! The next moment, it had our hen in its jaws.

“Hey! Hey!” Howard called out the window. “Drop that chicken!”

The fox did.

Howard, Tess, and I rushed outside. We followed a Milky Way of downy feathers through the tall grass of our neighbor's field. At the end of it lay the hen, motionless, her tail gone. Howard bent down to pick up the corpse. At the sight of his shadow, she got up and ran away.

But where were the others? Eaten? Bleeding, frightened, hiding in the grass? We could only find four. We asked Tess for help. Whenever we found that a tenant's or a neighbor's cat had some poor chipmunk pinned to the lawn, all we had to do was say, “Tess—chase that cat!” Even though she wouldn't normally chase cats on her own, instantly she came to the rodent's rescue. But our brilliant Tess, normally so prescient about our desires, was oddly useless in this endeavor. She ran about barking, joyous at the unexpected outing. Chris probably knew what happened but had nothing to say.

We had heard about the fox at a party two weeks before. A vixen had dug her den in the soft dirt behind the town garage just down the street from us on Route 137. When the adorable kits emerged, the guys at the garage—most of them
Guns and Ammo
readers, guys who couldn't wait to shoot their deer each fall—began to offer the fox family food. As a result, the foxes grew so tame they hunted fearlessly in backyards in broad daylight.

They ate one of our neighbor's chickens, and then ate another neighbor's ducks. The girls held funerals for our hens. I suggested we start a Fox Victims Support Group on our street. We no longer let the Ladies out that spring unless we were there to guard them.

And then, one day, as Howard and I were working in the yard, with Christopher tethered on his Plateau and Tess at our side, the fox struck again. We chased him and shouted, but this time the orange bandit did not drop the bird. It bounded off into the woods with her in its black-lipped mouth. We never saw that hen again.

W
E HAD BEEN THROUGH SUCH SORROWS BEFORE, AND WE WOULD
endure them again. One spring night, someone dug through the dirt floor into our chicken coop, killed one of the hens, and, unable to drag the carcass back out through the small exit hole, left me to discover the carnage in the morning. The next night I set out a Havahart trap baited with chicken liver. By morning the culprit was in custody.

The caged skunk was regal and calm, with a composure born of the confidence that a sac beneath its tail contained enough musk to clear the Pentagon. Skunks can spray up to twenty-three feet, and hit your face with accuracy at nine. Two nozzle-shaped nipples on either side of the anus can fire either an atomized spray or a stream of rain-sized droplets, as the skunk deems appropriate. Luckily, skunks aren't trigger-happy. I knew a New York researcher who tried to take a mouse away from a young skunk who was eating it; he was growled at, but not sprayed. Another researcher told me how he routinely picks up wild skunks
by their tails.

Once I had explained this to Lilla, she let Jane miss the bus and accompany us on our mission to release the captured skunk. (Kate, alas, had already left for school.) With Howard at the wheel, as Jane and I spoke in low, soothing tones, the skunk rode uneventfully in the back of our Subaru to the grounds of the Harris Center. The captive waited patiently for me to open the trapdoor. Then it calmly stepped out, fluffed its magnificent tail, and waddled off into the forest with dignity, looking rather like a stout woman in a fur coat stepping out of a limousine. Jane was a celebrity at school for her role in the release.

The skunk never came back, but other predators did. Twice, neighbors' dogs attacked the flock. A hawk dove out of the sky and killed a hen instantly. Another time, it was a mink: we pieced together the predator's identity from the killing bite to the hen's throat and the tracks in the snow. The prints led to Moose Brook, where the mink had slipped beneath the ice and swum away.

We had considered a number of ways to protect our hens. Gretchen did not allow her chickens free range, but provided a spacious fenced outdoor pen. But sometimes a fence made things worse. One spring when Gretchen was raising broilers, she noticed a number of birds missing. There were no holes in the fence or tunnels dug beneath it. But a few telltale feathers stuck to the chicken wire fence told a gruesome tale: a visiting raccoon had grabbed birds one by one and pulled them out through the wire, essentially pureeing its prey.

We felt our hens were probably safer loose during the day, where, if they were attacked, their own considerable wits allowed them at least a chance of escape. At night, when most predators typically hunt, we always closed them in. One summer, though, two hens chose instead to roost each night atop Christopher Hogwood as he slept in his pen. Possibly they reasoned that few predators would dare bother them there. Or maybe they just liked his company.

Some evenings, when I would close the Ladies in, I would stay awhile and let their calm and sweetness wash over me. Howard caught me talking with them once: “Yes, you're my beauties,” I whispered to them as they settled onto their night perches. I stroked their sleek backs and kissed their warm, rubbery combs. “I love you, Ladies.”

But because we had chosen to live in this place—a place we loved because it was still partly wild—we accepted the bargain: nothing could guarantee their safety.

H
UMAN RELATIONSHIPS WITH PREDATORS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN
thorny. Predators are the first creatures our kind purposely eradicates. Too often, people feel humans are and should be in control; we are enraged to discover this is not true. And when other creatures share our appetites and kill our livestock (often animals we were raising to kill, ourselves), we call them vandals and murderers. Here in southern New England, town histories celebrate the wars waged against wolves, mountain lions, bobcats, bears. Our region's last wolf, a crippled female with three legs who had retreated to Mount Monadnock, was pursued for months by angry men from nearby towns. Wounded by gunfire, chased, and bludgeoned, she was finally shot to death in a hunt in the winter of 1820. Mountain lions, never numerous, were believed extinct in New Hampshire by 1850. Our black bears had disappeared by the century's end, although a bounty remained until 1957. Bobcats were nearly gone as well, though bounties persisted on them until 1972. Only in the last few decades, as our forests recover from a century of clear-cutting, unregulated hunting, and wasteful farming, are the predators returning to New Hampshire

The story is the same around the world. Predators are the most persecuted creatures on Earth. If my life's work was, as I believed, to write about people's relationships with animals, it had been right to honor with my first book the three women scientists who changed forever our understanding of humankind's closest relatives. But next I was drawn to probe a more difficult relationship, one between people and predators—specifically tigers, the largest, most beautiful, and most deadly predators of all.

I planned to do my field research in a ten-thousand-square-kilometer mangrove swamp straddling India and Bangladesh along the Bay of Bengal, known as Sundarbans, which hosts the world's densest population of tigers. There is nowhere else like it on Earth. Here, for reasons no scientist understands, tigers routinely hunt people. They swim out into the ocean waves, swim after your boat like a dog chasing a car, climb on board, and eat you. In Sundarbans, tigers kill some three hundred people a year. And yet the people upon whom the tigers prey don't wish to eradicate the tigers. Instead, they worship them. I wanted to find out why.

“T
IGERS THAT
EAT
PEOPLE
,” H
OWARD SAID, WHEN
I
TOLD HIM MY
book idea. He was not thrilled. “Oh, that's just great. Why can't you stay home and get eaten by your pig?”

(We did sometimes wonder whether Chris would eat us. We decided that, given the opportunity—if, for example, one of us suddenly dropped dead into his pen, and if he was hungry—he might. We didn't hold this against him. He would miss us afterward.)

My mother, too, voiced concern. In her weekly letters and in our phone conversations, she suggested that rather than visit “those mean ole tigers in that awful,
dirty
country,” I instead “come on home” to Virginia—without Howard, of course—and write instead about the squirrels in the backyard. (My father had loved the squirrels and set out raisins and peanuts for them. My mother considered them edible rats. Growing up in Arkansas, she used to hunt and eat them.) I dismissed her worry as a mere social conceit: having a daughter eaten by a tiger might be a worse embarrassment to her than my having married a Jew.

Howard's misgivings, though, were quite real. But the thought that he worried something would happen to
me
didn't enter my mind. Surely he knew I was indestructible. What I thought irked him was the length, not the nature, of the field research. Researching
Spell of the Tiger,
I would be gone for months—leaving my husband to deal, alone, with hundreds of pounds of black and white problems.

When I was gone on day trips to Keene or to Boston, that's when Tess, normally so solicitous and refined, tended to roll in chicken droppings, poop in my office, or throw up on our bed. And what if something happened to the hens or the cockatiel while I was away? But, of course, the biggest source, quite literally, of potential disaster would be Christopher Hogwood.

Our pig was growing increasingly impressive, and not just in bulk. Once he turned two, his tusks were evident. At three, they were prominent. The lower tusks were short and sharp, and stuck out from the sides of his mouth. The upper tusks curled handsomely above his lip, like those of a warthog. I thought they lent him an even more cheerful, smiling aspect, though parents of young children who came to visit didn't always share this impression at first.

The Lillas and I admired Christopher's growing tusks. During Pig Spa, we were tempted to brush them. We decided against it. Looking back on it, this was probably wise.

I
T WAS THE FIRST
S
ATURDAY IN
M
AY, WARM AND SUNNY
. T
HE PIG
was out on his Plateau, rooting in the soft, wet earth, swishing away the first blackflies of spring with his wondrous tail. While Howard was out on an errand, I'd cleaned the house and finished the grocery shopping, and was looking forward to a visit from our friend Beth. It was the sort of day when you feel nothing can go wrong.

Howard and I had known Beth Bishop for a couple of years, but Tess had known her much longer. Beth worked as a volunteer at Evelyn's shelter. She was a serious animal lover, with a special spot in her heart for big, old dogs. Over the past fifteen years, Beth has adopted no fewer than eight huge, black Newfoundlands, many of them elderly. These lumbering, drooly Saint Bernard–sized beasts seemed incongruous roommates for Beth, a knockout platinum blonde whose makeup was always perfect. She was forty-six but looked twenty-six; on days she wore shorts, the checkout line to her cash register was always the longest at the A&P.

After her shift was over, nearly every day, Beth drove over to Evelyn's to help clean, walk, groom, and medicate the dozens of unwanted, injured, and rescued animals: A three-legged Great Pyrenees. A dachshund with a broken back. A cat injured in a steel-jaw leghold trap. A China white goose with a limp. A blind Pekingese. In Evelyn's log-cabin home, there was a room just for puppies down the hall from the bathroom, and a cattery downstairs. The horses grazed on the land across the street.

Beth remembered well the terrible day Tess had been injured, and the many months of her brave recovery. “Tess the Wonder Dog,” Beth called her. She rejoiced when she learned that a local couple had adopted Tess; as it turned out, Beth lived just a mile from our house. When we finally met, Beth said, “Oh, you belong to Tess!” We'd been friends ever since.

With her soft spot for huge beasts, naturally Beth adored Christopher—she considered him “the Newfie of pigdom”—and when she came to visit, she always brought him treats: bruised melons, wilting lettuce, expired bread the A&P was throwing away. And that was the case on this day. We had just poured out a slops feast for him and stepped back to watch him eat.