The Good Good Pig Read online

  “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.

  WE 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.

  HUMAN 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.

  “TIGERS THAT EAT PEOPLE,” HOWARD 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.

  IT WAS THE FIRST SATURDAY IN MAY, WARM AND SUNNY. THE 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.

  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.

  THOUGH I WAS APPALLED AT THE ACCIDENT, BETH 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.”