The Good Good Pig (11 page)

But then Beth reached toward Chris, as if he were in fact a Newfie, to give him a pat on the head. He might have thought she wanted to take her garbage back—which she did not—for he nudged her out of the way with the side of his head. It was nothing aggressive. He didn't bark or growl. He didn't even give her a dirty look (pigs' eyes are very expressive—one of our friends claimed Christopher had eyes like the actor Claude Rains, who played the cynical police chief in
Casablanca
). Beth said nothing, but I noticed a red slice on the inside of her left thigh, about seven inches below the hem of her shorts—a slice so deep that it revealed the yellow layer of subcutaneous fat above the muscle.

Christopher had caught her with the edge of one lower tusk. The tooth was so sharp she hadn't felt the cut. Neither one of them had any idea what had happened.

But now the wound was dripping blood.

“Uh, Beth,” I said, trying to sound very, very calm, “I think Chris might have clipped you with his tusk just now.”

She glanced at her leg. Because of the location of the injury, she couldn't really see how bad it was. “Oh, it'll be OK,” she said. She was used to 150-pound Newfies leaping up on her and raking her accidentally with their claws. “Do you think I need a Band-Aid?”

It was going to need more than a Band-Aid.

“I think the cut might be kind of deep,” I mentioned casually. “In fact, it might be a good idea to drop by the hospital, just to let them take a look.”

Now Beth was worried. “I don't want a shot,” she said. “I hate shots! And I'm not going to do stitches. Promise me they won't do stitches.”

The emergency room physician took one look at the wound, pulled out an immense needle, gave Beth an injection that hurt much worse than the injury, and put in four stitches. In the small box on the medical form where you describe the event that prompted the visit to the emergency room, the doctor wrote “pig collision.”

When Beth went home that evening, she had a hankering for music. She turned on the stereo and put on the album of her choice: Fleetwood Mac's
Tusk.

T
HOUGH
I
WAS APPALLED AT THE ACCIDENT,
B
ETH WAS NEVER THE
least bit angry. The next day, though Beth missed work (we insisted on paying her lost wages), she still limped over to our house to see Chris again. As always, Chris and Beth were delighted to see each other. Nothing between them had changed.

“I didn't have to go to therapy for pig-phobia or anything,” Beth said. “To me, it wasn't a negative thing at all,” she insisted. “It added some excitement to my life!”

The next day, when she did return to work, she wore shorts again, revealing a huge bandage. Hers was not just the longest but also the slowest lane at the checkout counter that day. Everyone wanted to hear the story. “Christopher didn't attack me,” she explained to each customer. “It was a mistake. His tusks stuck out. He couldn't help it.”

To make matters worse, Beth's wound became infected. She had to make several follow-up visits to the hospital. The medical paperwork reflected mounting concern. The “event” box for the second visit did not read “pig collision” but was changed to “pig bite.” By her final visit, the event had had escalated to “gored by pig.”

It was clear that something had to be done about Christopher's tusks, and fast.

Chris didn't mean to hurt anyone. He was a gentle soul. He was famously patient with children, particularly with kids who were shy—his grunts were softer and his movements slower, something that sensitive parents always noted with amazement. Chris was fine around people in wheelchairs, too, which not all animals are; some dogs, for instance, chase and bite wheelchairs the same way others chase cyclists. A big pig such as Chris could easily upend a wheelchair or puncture its tires. And this was a concern when Liz's daughter, Stephanie, a disability rights activist who has used a wheelchair since a teenage spinal injury, first came to see Chris on a holiday visit with her husband, Bob. Bob is a fellow activist who uses a chair, too. The first time they came, they watched from their van as we let Chris run past the windshield like some warthog at a safari park. But later (with Stephie's strong brother, Ramsay, a mountain guide, standing by in case of the need for a quick retreat) everyone met
en plein air.
Chris sniffed the tires on the wheelchairs with curiosity but didn't try to bite them. He and Stephie and Bob got on famously, and we knew we could count on him to be polite with later visitors in wheelchairs, too.

But still—without realizing the danger of his own tusks, what if Christopher literally ran into someone on one of his jaunts around town? What if a child was injured?

All twenty or so species of wild pigs, both males and females, grow tusks and know well how to use them—usually with admirable restraint. The extravagant upper tusks are not particularly dangerous. Warthogs and babirusas employ them for largely symbolic head-to-head clashes, from which the loser escapes by kneeling and squealing; the victor turns and walks away. Most pigs, in fact, resolve their conflicts peacefully. Peccaries, for instance, often squabble but seldom really fight. Invariably, quarreling peccaries end up at some point nose to rump, a position that allows them to imbibe the elixir of these pigs' most potent scent glands, located at the rear. At this point, the contestants are apparently overwhelmed by the intoxicating delights of each other's piggy perfume and their anger is defused. Upon inhaling the essence of the rival, “both stop struggling,” reports biologist Lyall Watson, who has seen this in the wild. In his fine book on pigs of the world,
The Whole Hog,
he describes how “their eyes half close, and a soft, dreamy look steals over their faces.” All is forgiven.

Wild boars, too, usually manage to avoid bloodshed. They will stand shoulder to shoulder and lean against each other and try to throw the other down by wedging a snout under the rival's hip, whereupon the dispute is usually considered settled.

But the wild card in predicting the outcome of porcine aggression is this: pigs are extremely emotional. They can be deeply devoted and intuitive. But like people, they are also prone to sulks, irrational fears, and tantrums. The behaviorist Ivan Pavlov once worked with pigs but gave up on them. “All pigs,” he concluded, “are hysterical.”

With their tusks and great bulk, their omnivorous diet and sometimes frightening voices, it is easy to forget that pigs are ungulates. But hooves don't lie. Hooves are the heritage of flight: eons of running away sculpted the hardened tiptoes that define the ungulates, from antelopes to horses, from goats to pigs to giraffes. Deep in their genes, pigs remember. Forty million years of porcine evolution says: somebody is trying to eat you. Forty thousand years of barnyard history says: somebody
is
going to eat you. Who wouldn't be hysterical?

Howard and I simply could not afford to be responsible for an hysterical 350-pound pig blunderbussing through Hancock armed with razor-sharp tusks. For the good of the community, we had but one choice: tuskectomy.

I knew Chris wasn't going to like it, but I phoned Tom Dowling. Tom was a vet with a practice in a neighboring town. He had earned his master's degree in pigs. We had first become acquainted the year before, due to a math error. As part of routine hog husbandry, Howard and I wormed Christopher annually. That year, I had gone to buy the medicine at Agway. When you buy it in bulk, the drug is packaged for a lot of little pigs, not one big pig. I calculated the dose wrong. Hours after he had swallowed the medicine, Christopher came down with what looked like a terrible stomachache. I had poisoned him!

Who in the area treated pigs? George and Mary's pig vet was too far away. We had a wonderful vet for Tess, but at the time I did not know he treated large animals, too. Based on a horse-owning friend's recommendation, I summoned Tom. At the sight of the tall, lanky vet entering his pen, Chris struggled to his feet, trying to greet his visitor. Expertly, Tom got a loop of rope over Christopher's snout, and to my amazement, Chris's reaction—a known reflex among pigs—was to stand as if frozen in his tracks, screaming but eerily unable to move, enabling Tom to squirt liquid-activated charcoal down Christopher's throat to neutralize the excess wormer.

Although Chris didn't thrash, he still managed to dramatically register his displeasure. A pig's screams can be quite literally deafening, a health threat deemed serious enough to merit an article in the
Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association
titled “Incidence of Hearing Loss in Swine Veterinarians.”
“Ree! Ree! Ree-e-e-e-e-e!”
Christopher shrieked, at the same time shooting thick streams of liquid charcoal out of his nose and mouth. When the eruption was over, Tom was as black as a chimney sweep. But Christopher was all right.

So it was to Tom I turned again. Because Christopher had met Tom only once, well over a year before, I hoped he wouldn't remember him. But unfortunately, Christopher seemed to have excellent recall. He never forgot the location of the Amidon lettuce garden, for instance, and it was clear Christopher remembered a number of people and recognized them easily. (I later learned this is typical of pigs: laboratory tests show pigs easily outperform dogs in learning mazes, and pigs can recognize people not only by smell but also by sight alone. Pigs can also discriminate between people at a distance, even when the people are wearing identical clothes.) That Christopher remembered people was obvious in his greeting grunts. His grunts were low and soft for Kate and Jane, deep and manly for Howard; there was one distinctive grunt he used only for our friend Ray Cote. The president of a software company, Ray's busy schedule permitted only rare visits. But each time he came to his pen, Chris emitted deep, loud, long, fantastically appreciative greetings he offered no other person. Why? Ray and Chris had much in common: they were both smart and strong and funny. But what Chris may have liked best was that Ray weighed about four hundred pounds. Chris may have thought he had finally found one of His People.

But would our pig remember Tom? The minute Hogwood caught sight of him, he began to shriek hysterically—and didn't stop until Tom had finished sawing (painlessly, he promised) both of Christopher's sharp lower tusks to blunt, harmless stubs.

Y
OU MIGHT THINK
I'
D HAVE BEEN AS WORRIED ABOUT THE JAWS OF
Sundarbans's tigers as I was about the tusks of our pig. I was not. Truth be told, my getting eaten was never one of my worries. My worries about the trip were all centered on Hancock, that something bad might happen while I was gone. I never would have admitted it, but the hardest part of any trip I ever took was leaving home.

I was vulnerable to homesickness—but immune, in my mind, to death. I could not even fathom my husband's and my mother's concern for me. I was too lucky to die, but I reckoned that even if I did, getting eaten was a fine way for me to go. Plus, if I got nailed by an experienced tiger, it probably wouldn't hurt. Tigers stalk and ambush hunters, and almost always attack from the back. A skilled tiger sinks its canines into the spaces between the neck vertebrae of its prey, severing the spinal cord as neatly as a key opens a lock. In Sundarbans, it's said that people attacked by tigers are often killed so quickly they don't have time to scream.

I almost got a chance to find out. On my first expedition, my boat got stuck in the mud in an area where tigers were known to be hiding. My boatman, Girindra Nath Mridha, handed me a machete and my photographer an ax. During the endless minutes that Girindra and his son worked to push the craft free, we stood back to back on the deck of the boat with only these weapons to defend our party against the tiger if it chose to attack.

Later, we had an even closer call. We chugged down a wide river and then turned up a small channel. Fearful of getting stuck, Girindra turned the boat around—to reveal tiger tracks so fresh that they couldn't have been more than two minutes old. But the tiger had not simply swum across the little channel; there were no prints on the opposite bank. We backtracked to the larger river and, to our amazement, discovered that the tiger had entered the water from the forest there. The tiger had swum after our boat.

Through it all, Girindra, a strong, slight man my age who had seen an uncle killed by a tiger, was never angry. He feared the tiger, but he did not hate it. Like his fellow villagers, Girindra would never hurt a tiger except in direct self-defense. No one poached tigers in Sundarbans. To search out a tiger to kill it was unthinkable.

What, I wondered, did they know about predators that most people have forgotten?

To research the book, I went back to Sundarbans again and again. At first I stayed at the little tourist lodge across the river from Girindra's village. But later, with a translator, I stayed with Girindra's family—his beautiful wife, Namita, his mother, MaBisaka, and his eight children—at the smooth mud and thatch house they had made by hand. They were eager to help with my book. By day, in Girindra's wooden boat, we would search the banks of the muddy creeks for tiger signs. At night, the neighbors—fishermen, honey gatherers, widows—would gather at his home, smoking clove-scented bidis and chewing betel nut, and by the light of the kerosene lamp they would tell me stories of tigers and crocodiles, gods and ghosts. After they would go, I would lie in the darkness, trying not to think of Christopher's ears or Howard's laugh, or the way that Tess would now lie on her back on our bed and expose her white belly to us in complete, trusting bliss. Home seemed as far away as a half-remembered dream, and the thought of it would seize my throat with a sob.

When I came home, it was Sundarbans that felt like a dream. Which was the dream and which was real? Girindra's letters reminded me: both were real. We wrote each other regularly—we still do—my letters translated into Bengali and his to me into English by the teacher at the village school.
“Amar chotto bon,”
his letters usually begin, “my little sister.” Shortly after my second trip to Sundarbans, Girindra, who as a Hindu believes in multiple lifetimes, announced that he thought he and I had been brother and sister in a former life. Girindra's eight children called me
pishima,
the beautiful Bengali word for paternal aunt.