The Good Good Pig (4 page)

“You've got to be careful with pigs, you know,” Dick told me later. “They can be pretty fierce. But not Christopher. There's not a vicious bone in his body.”

Many animals, understandably, bite you if you stand between them and food. Christopher wanted that lettuce. I was very impressed that under these circumstances, Christopher was not even trying to bite my neighbor.

So was Dick. “You know, I thought about it later, Sy, and it dawned on me why he and I got along so well,” he mused. Dick and Eleanor used to be quite active in the Republican party, but Dick later switched his allegiance to the Libertarians. “If there's ever been an example of a Libertarian pig, that's Christopher,” he said. “He's his own person, he doesn't want overregulation—all the things that Libertarians look for. He's a free spirit.”

That he was. One time Howard looked out the upstairs window from the spare bedroom he uses as his office. “Ah, there goes so-and-so,” he thought, noting a passing jogger. “There goes such-and-such in her car…. There goes Chris.”

Wait!
Chris
?

We both ran outside.

E
ARLY IN OUR CAREERS AS SWINEHERDS, WE THOUGHT ABOUT
building a fence for our pig. But fencing swine is notoriously difficult—a fence must be very strong indeed to keep a pig from pushing it down or excavating beneath it. But again, Gretchen came to our rescue. She had just the thing. She showed up one day with a small section of electric mesh fencing, eighty feet of it, just as a demo. “This,” she promised confidently, “will solve all your problems.”

Unlike the strand or two of electric wire used to fence horses, electric mesh ensures the pig can't dig under or leap over the fencing, she said. Pigs quickly learn to respect the boundaries from the first electric shock they receive on touching it. Because the fencing is so easy to set up, it's also easy to expand the pigpen and move it around to afford fresh pasture whenever needed.

“Will it hurt him?” I asked dubiously. “I don't want to even try it if it might hurt him.”

“No,” she assured me as she set up the fence to form a little corral outside the barn. “It won't hurt him at all. He'll touch it with his nose and get a tiny shock, and he'll back off right away.”

“Are you sure?”

“He'll figure it out immediately,” Gretchen said as she set up the electric charger. “I've never known an animal not to. Don't worry. You'll see. Watch.”

She plugged the extension cord into the socket. I opened Christopher's gate and stepped over the three-foot-tall fencing to the other side.

Chris ran right over to greet us, hit the electric fence with his sensitive nose, and shrieked in pain.

He did not stop shrieking. Nor did he back off. He pushed harder and harder at the fence, using his too-big spotted head as a battering ram against the pain. His screams undulated in frequency, in time with the pulse of the current:
“Ree! Ree! Ree!…Ree! Ree! Ree!”

I joined in immediately.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!…Pull the Plug!”
For those few seconds—which felt to me like many minutes—Chris and I could have drowned out a jackhammer. The neighbors must have decided that an ax murderer in our yard was butchering us both.

Gretchen unplugged the extension cord. Chris was fine, if a bit dazed, but I was a wreck.

“Oh, dear,” said Gretchen, “I guess that's not going to work after all.”

Some species simply cannot walk backward—nine-banded armadillos, for example, can
hop
backward but not walk. But this is not the case with pigs. Nor was Chris's reaction due to a failure of intellect. But what had happened gave me an important insight into the emotional life of this strange little barrel-shaped, cloven-hoofed creature who had transformed us from a couple to a family.

Now I understood what it means to be pig headed.

Christopher Hogwood was a creature of his convictions. When he wanted something, he went, well, whole hog. And what he wanted—whether it was us, or beer, or simply freedom—was on the other side of that fence.

I
KNOW THE ALLURE OF THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FENCE
. I
ONCE
spent six months in a state of almost perfect freedom, on the other side of the world, living in a condition that Howard considered “feral.”

After I graduated from college and had worked for five years at the
Courier-News,
my father gave me the gift of a ticket to Australia. I decided to join an Earthwatch expedition—becoming a paying layman working with scientists—assisting with a Chicago Zoological Society study of the habitat of the rare southern hairy-nosed wombat in the scrub desert of South Australia. I loved it so much that the principal investigator, biologist Pamela Parker, offered me a chance to conduct my own studies there. She couldn't pay me or cover my airfare, but she would let me eat for free. I quit my newspaper job and moved to a tent in the outback.

When I arrived, I didn't know what I would study. But one day, as I was alone collecting plant samples for another researcher, I looked up and saw three flightless, four-foot-tall, ostrichlike birds curiously approaching me, less than fifteen yards away. Emus. It was love at first sight.

They could have killed me. With their strong legs, emus can run forty miles an hour and sever fencing wire with a single kick. But incredibly—even though they are more closely related to dinosaurs than to people, even though I had nothing to offer them—these giant birds tolerated my company. They let me follow them. I was able to find them day after day, eventually walking beside them at a distance of only a few feet, recording their every move. No one had ever done this before.

Each observation was a revelation: each choice of berry or seed, each posture of their black periscope necks, each time one combed a feather through its beak to preen. I tried to see the outback through the emus' mahogany eyes, their vision forty times more acute than my own. I felt my senses come alive. Soon I was so hooked I didn't even want to leave the emus long enough to take the weekly trip to shower at the nearest town.

I had gone wild, and I am sure I looked it. So that the birds would recognize me, I made a point of wearing the same clothes every day: my father's Army jacket, the shirt I'd slept in, my blue jeans, a red bandana. There were no mirrors in camp, and I forgot to brush my hair for so long that I developed a giant mat in the back like you'd find in the fur of a stray dog. But as I wandered through the emus' stark desert world with my runny nose and filthy clothes and matted hair, I felt whole, even beautiful, for the first time in my life.

Not that I wasn't sometimes lonely. I was acutely aware that Howard, the ferrets and the lovebirds, my parents, and my friends were halfway around the world. My day was their night, and my winter their summer. We even slept beneath different stars. But, far away from everything I knew, I felt cleansed and open. I was hungry to fill my emptied soul with the dramas of this new place: its parched orange soil, its thorny acacias, and the lives of the alien creatures with whom I had fallen deeply and passionately in love.

When I left the emus, I wept for days. This was the story of my life: I was always leaving. Unlike Howard, who had lived in the same house on Long Island since the day his parents brought him home from Huntington Hospital, I didn't know what it was like to belong to one place. I had not even been born in this country, but in Germany, where my father was stationed at Frankfurt. The longest my family had stayed anywhere was Quarters 225, Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, New York—a house my parents didn't own—for just over four years. Even after my father retired from the military, we kept moving—New Jersey, Virginia, then back to Jersey again—as he shifted jobs in the shipping business. No wonder all my childhood pets had never been bigger than Molly, the Scottish terrier with whom I grew up like a sister. Everyone had to be portable. Never had I been rooted enough to commit to a really large animal.

I loved travel, I loved exploring, and I loved wildness. But now, in Hancock, with a pig in the barn, I would find the other piece of my heart's lifelong yearning: home.

H
OWARD AND
I
GAVE UP ON THE FENCE FOR
C
HRISTOPHER.
Instead, we fitted him with a harness devised for a small dog—which we later traded for one for a medium dog and then one for a large dog. We hooked him up to a tether at the edge of the woods in back of what was once a chicken shack and now a little studio. We called the area the Pig Plateau. Tied to an ash tree, stretching twenty feet long, the tether afforded Christopher access to both shade and sun, grass and brush. The location even featured a nice mud wallow in a seep from Moose Brook. Here, Christopher could root to his heart's content. The whole area quickly came to resemble Vietnam after the Tet offensive.

Chris seemed to like the tether arrangement. He liked his yard. He also liked wrapping the rope around a tree in such a way as to create the precise combination of pressure and tension that would release the metal clasp from his harness and allow him to run free.

L
OOSE PIGS WERE SOMETHING ALL
A
MERICANS KNEW ABOUT A
couple of hundred years ago, and not just in the country. New York's financial district was named for the long, permanent wall erected in 1652 to restrict the travels of lower Manhattan's free-roaming hogs, along which Wall Street was later built. Loose swine were once a part of every American city. Pigs grew fat for the dinner table while cleaning public spaces of garbage. Pretty much everyone liked it until the pigs got bossy and began to crowd people off the sidewalks.

In the early days of our village, “for many years the settlers permitted their swine to run at large,” reports
The History of Hancock, New Hampshire, 1764–1889
. “That the swine of those days had unusual privileges granted them, the following incident in the life of Moses Dennis, Sr., will show,” writes the author William Willis Hayward. “It was his duty one year to serve the notices of the annual training. In the discharge of it, as he was entering one of the log cabins, which being without windows was somewhat dark, he suddenly found himself most unceremoniously caught up and carried out backwards, and as unceremoniously set down. He was so taken by surprise that at first he could not comprehend the meaning of his strange reception. He soon discovered that a hog in the house had been frightened by his entrance and in his haste to escape, ran between his legs (which were very short ones), caught him up and deposited him as before stated.”

By 1786, though, things changed. That year, an important new office was instituted in our village: the post of hog reeve. At that time, just about every settlement of any size had at least one hog reeve—a sort of sheriff whose duty it was to capture and corral troublemaking hogs. Ten years later, Hancock, with a human population of just over six hundred, needed no fewer than six hog reeves to keep local pigs under control.

Alas, by the time Christopher arrived in Hancock, the office of hog reeve had long since been retired. But, happily, we had Ed Coughlan. Ed was our police chief. For eleven years, he was Hancock's only full-time cop.

Ed was well suited to the task. He was a local guy—he had worked as a small-equipment operator for the state highway department, and raised a family in town with his pretty, blue-eyed wife. With his boyish straight brown bangs, soulful blue eyes, and gentle, modest manner, he had none of the “Step aside, I'm in charge here” brusqueness that police academies seemed to train for. True, he'd had to go to the police academy in Concord for twelve weeks once he was promoted to chief—but most of the job, he said, was “just plain common sense. I have plenty of that,” he told me one day. “I just don't have any other kind.”

Happily, Hancock offers a cop little chance to battle hard-core crime. Policing the village poses different challenges. For one thing, a number of our elderly residents are losing their eyesight, and as a result frequently hit buildings, cars, and sometimes people while driving their cars. One of our venerable citizens, a former piano teacher who was over ninety years old and legally blind, hit and injured a flagman working on the road. Sometimes they hit each other. One sweet elderly lady, attempting to park at the post office, instead drove past the loading dock, over an embankment, and thumped down on the entrance to the town “beach” on Norway Pond. When Ed came to the scene, he noticed some orange paint on her car. “Where did that come from?” he asked. “Oh, that was where I hit someone last week,” she replied calmly.

Ed couldn't be everywhere, but at least one other resident did her best to help police the streets. A short, sometimes grumpy, heavyset woman in her thirties with big blue eyes, she liked to stand in the middle of Main Street in front of the Cash Market and direct traffic. Out-of-towners always obeyed her, not realizing that they were trusting the direction and speed of their car to a person who was mentally retarded. Then there was the sweet, stocky, gray-haired heiress who walked around town in all seasons wearing a tentlike housedress, short socks, and sturdy, well-worn boots. Everyone knew she wasn't quite right, but she had a kind heart. She was often seen at the post office mailing candy to cheer the families of missing children listed on milk cartons, or at the store buying thirty rolls of toilet paper that a clerk would then have to carry to her house.

Ed kept an eye out for these folks, and for everyone else, too. He was like a favorite uncle called in to mediate family squabbles. Even big-city cops will tell you that domestic disturbances are among the most dangerous situations an officer can face, and Ed handled plenty of these. But no problem was too big or too small, as you could see in the local paper, which prints the police log. Some typical excerpts: A squirrel in a garage on Main Street. (It was gone by the time Ed got there.) A turtle on the yellow line on the state highway. (Its removal at 3 p.m. was duly noted.) A child was heard screaming from inside a house. (He didn't want to eat his dinner.) Things are pretty much the same in surrounding towns. In Peterborough, the police log recently reported someone had called 911 because a guinea pig was locked in a car at the hospital parking lot on a hot day. The window was down, but the guinea pig had no water. (People suspected I was the caller, but I wasn't.)