This morning I was roused out of a sound and rare sleep by my wife blowing her nose. It was 2:18am. With our 1.25 year old enduring the trials of cutting teeth, we haven't been getting really great sleep for some time now, so being jolted out of a really quality slumber was truly annoying. Generally if I wake up before the alarm I don't tend to fall back asleep as my mind begins tracing over the things I need to worry about. The thought of being up today starting at 2:18 was not a happy one, which only contributed to my angst and foiled the possibility of my getting back to sleep.
At 4:02 I looked at the clock and got out of bed, took a shower, shaved, got dressed in my khaki pants and a stripped dress shirt, pulled on my boots, put on my Carharts jacket, my hat and slipped out as quietly as I could. The door hinge on the front door squeaked as I stepped into the misty morning dark at 4:22. As I was unlocking my truck using my cel phone as a flashlight to guide my key, the porch light came on. I froze. My wife stepped outside dressed in her pajamas, hugging herself from the cold. “Where are you going?”, she asked. “I can't sleep so I'm going to the office”, I replied. She went back inside and turned off the light.
I pulled out of our short driveway onto Highway 128 and accelerated at a relaxed pace toward Boonville. I turned my wipers on the lowest intermittent setting to clear the mist from the windshield. The pre-dawn was dark and inky. The mist seemed to absorb the light from my headlights like black felt. My mind drifted to thoughts of teaching my drafting class as the truck shifted through the gears like an American made truck that is coming up on needing a new transmission does; tacking up higher than it should and abruptly shifting and lurching forward slightly into the next gear.
Within moments I was approaching Smoot Sink, a portion of road which has continued to subside for centuries. They estimate that there is over 40 feet of roadbed under the existing road surface, and it continues to develop cracks as it shifts. I passed the first blinking signs that say 'rough road' and '35 mph'. These caution signs, they're always too conservative. I've grown accustomed to driving over the 'rough road' at 55 or 60. I was dreamily contemplating this while looking at the second set of blinking warning signs when something bright appeared in the road with some other bright things that seemed to be crossing the road. I don't know how long it took to register, but I finally realized I was about to run into a large wild pig. Maybe more as there was a whole bunch of them crossing directly across the road from the uphill side toward Rancheria Creek.
The breaks have anti-lock, but I don't think I hit them hard enough to engage that system. This is an old habit formed from driving old cars in my youth and having to rely on my own breaking ability. Regardless, I slowed rapidly which sent all the crap I keep on my seat onto the floor and around my feet. Videotapes of Ingvar's 26th birthday in the Virgin Islands where he jumps off a bridge and breaks two ribs in a gut, my tonsillectomy performed by my dad when I was 15, and our fishing trip to Vancouver Island, a 200' tape measure, my school briefcase, 5/8 empty Aquafina water bottles...
As the truck decelerated in the 30 or so feet I had to work with, I looked at the clock and made a note of the time, 4:28. It was not a conscious decision to do so, but it was actually a priority over paying attention to maximizing my deceleration at that moment. Dan is the caretaker of the land that I was driving past, and for the last several months we have been trying to kill some or all of the wild pigs that are tearing up the property. Up until now, neither of us had seen a single solitary pig on the property, despite the enormity of sign left behind by them. So it was a point of interest to know when they were doing their thing.
The truck hit the pig going about 30 with a sound you'd expect a 100 pound pig to make when a truck hits it. Actually, what I heard was the sound of the truck bumper hitting the pig: a dull, hollow metal, thump.
The pig flew straight down the lane and hit the asphalt like a water balloon that doesn't pop when you or your partner fail to make the catch in the balloon toss game at the July 4th celebration. The truck continued to decelerate at a more rapid pace, so the pig ended up about 12 feet in front of the truck when we both came to a stop. I sat in my seat feeling suddenly very awake as the pig tried to crawl out of the road with it's two front legs. One of it's rear legs was moving ineffectively, and the other seemed completely shattered. After moments, the pig stopped its attempts and sat propped up on its front legs, oriented toward the shoulder of my lane and regarded the truck with it's eyes, glowing red from the headlights.
I put the truck in park and made up my mind that the pig needed to get out of the highway for the sake of the safety of other drivers. Oh yeah, and that pig should probably be put out of it's misery.
I got out and grabbed the hatchet that I keep in the door pocket. I hefted it in my right hand to optimize my grip on the handle which, turned around to use the blunt side, felt awkward, like using left handed scissors or trying to straighten the last kink in a wire coat hanger. As I came around the right quarter-panel of my truck, I glanced at the bumper and noticed a healthy dent on it. No surprise there. Then I focused my attention on the pig. It was white with small black spots and didn't have tusks, so it wasn't as scary as it could have been, but scary none the less, it was definitely hurt and pissed-off. I circled around it to gain a good angle from which to strike a solid blow flat on it's skull above it's eyes where Jimmy the butcher always shot the pigs at Alan's farm, and found that the pig maintained an even stare straight at me no mater where I stood. This meant that I could only hit the mark with a sort of an under-handed back-hand kind of swing. Awkward. I circled around again and found myself looking into the lights of my truck which made it harder to see the pig, and meant that the pig had a better view of me. Thinking I would take advantage of that, I went back to between the headlights and steeled myself for the next step.
Not having much experience with what an injured pig weighing 100 pounds is capable of, and not wanting to get injured myself, I found myself doing a furtive dance while going about doing the poor thing in. The only way I could swing the hatchet was with this lame under-back-hand swing and I needed to get fairly close to make that work. I imagined that pig getting a good chomp in on my leg and ended up taking several short swipes at its head which made it more upset and vocal. Every time a blow landed, it would make a shrill, raspy, squeal which sounded deafening, but the mist muffled from echoing off the hills around. The blows were, at first, ineffectual by any observation. It wasn't until my own adrenaline kicked in that I stopped thinking and just went for its head with a good strong backhand. This was always my favorite when playing racket-ball. The blow landed on its brow eliciting a startled shriek. A second disabled the eye and seemed to stun the pig as it turned its head to my right giving me a decent opening for a forehand strike which I immediately took advantage of. The first of these caused the pig to quiver, but it was still shrieking, the second silenced it, and it lay down. A few more whacks and the pig listed onto its left side. I gave it a few seconds, and then nudged it with my foot a few times to make sure it wasn't going to revive when I grabbed its feet to drag it off the road. There was no response, so I put my hatchet back in my truck and came back to finally get it off the road. I nudged it again to make sure it hadn't got it's second wind or anything, then grabbed it by the rear legs and dragged it onto the dewy grass on the shoulder.
I'm not sure when I had decided this, but I was going back home to get my hunting knife so I could bleed it out, gut it, take it home, dress it out, and put it in the freezer. Upon my return my wife was curious about why I had come back. I told her about the pig and my plan to put it in the freezer and she said “I'll call my brother to help.” She got on her cel phone and called my brother-in-law while I changed into work clothes and grabbed my knife. I decided to take a gallon of water to rinse our hands after any mess and she suggested I should take some paper towels too. With the knife, gallon milk jug full of water, and a roll of paper towels, I got back in my truck thinking, “Is this it? This is all I need for this?”. It seemed like so little for the task I was about to perform, but that was all and more than was required.
Returning to the scene at around 4:50 or so, I parked my truck past the pig and backed up so it would be near my tailgate and I could use my reverse lights to see what I was doing. The highway now seemed to be rather busy and 6 or 7 cars drove by before my brother-in-law arrived. In the meantime, I did a sort of hide and seek game with the other drivers so as not to freak anyone out. I would kneel by the pig and perform some of the evisceration and then get up and stand by the truck acting like I was arranging something in the back or in the cab when someone drove by. It was slow going with the interruptions, the difficulty of gutting a 100 pound pig on its side alone, and my own misgivings about my skill in this department. My brother-in-law had done this lots, and I had only once before on a much smaller wild pig. The tendency was to want to just wait until he got there, so I stopped and started a few times whenever I got bogged down by the difficulty of cutting with one hand while holding the body cavity open with the other. I had the intestines and stomach out but didn't have the confidence to cut out the anus and it was impossible for me to get into the ribcage and cut out the lungs and heart without help or something to prop the pig on its back, so I decided to just wait for him.
As I was rinsing off my hands so I could get in the truck to stay warm, I had a disconcerting thought. What if he couldn't make it for some reason? Even if he called my wife to let us know, my cel phone probably wouldn't get her call and she couldn't leave the baby to come and let me know. If I were her I wouldn't wake up the baby, dress him up, and pack him in the car, just to let me know he wasn't going to lend me a hand as I would assume I could do it in a little more time by myself. That and he was coming over mostly to help with dressing it out. So I decided I had to get the job done by myself if I could. It was 5:15, just a few minutes before he arrived thankfully, and we finished the job in a short time saving out the liver, heart and kidneys and slapping them down in the back of the truck. We picked up the pig by the front and hind feet and did the old 'one...two...THREE!' swing thing and just barely got it on the tailgate, but it stayed up, and we shoved it into the bed.
Back at home we set about skinning it by cutting around the ankles and separating the skin from the carcass by cutting in the fatty layer between the skin and the muscle. I was surprised and pleased to see that it had a good layer of fat on it. Apparently it has been a good acorn year. I served mostly as assistant by holding the pig in place and adjusting limbs and things as he began to cut, chop, and saw it into manageable pieces. He grew up in the former Yugoslavia on a farm with my wife where they did this kind of thing all the time, and I was really glad he was there to help. By 6:45, when he had to leave to go to work at the brewery, we had the entire pig dressed out, cut up, placed in an ice chest, and had ourselves washed up, and eaten an oatmeal breakfast which my wife had prepared for us. That gave me an hour to rinse the meat, bag it, put it in the freezer, wash off the tools, hose out my truck, clean myself up, change clothes, and hit the road for the computer drafting class that I teach at the high school. It was tight, and I didn't have time to replace the 11x17 paper in the copier at school before the bell, so the kids will be getting their quiz on Monday. Not that they'll mind. And me, I've got 60 pounds of pork in the freezer.
Any relation to Lizzie Borden?